Screenplay: The Hours

Overview
David Hare’s 2002 screenplay distills Michael Cunningham’s novel into an intricately intercut triptych following three women over the course of a single day, each shadowed by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Beginning with a brief glimpse of Woolf’s 1941 suicide, the script shifts to 1923 Richmond, 1950s Los Angeles, and contemporary New York, threading their hours together through repeated actions, mirrored images, and echoing lines. The screenplay balances intimate domestic detail with sweeping meditations on art, illness, desire, and the price of survival.

Plot
In Richmond, Virginia Woolf struggles against suburban exile and the vigilance of her husband Leonard as she begins the novel that will become Mrs Dalloway. The everyday, servants, a sister’s visit, children in the garden, presses on her as she searches for the right opening and a binding theme. A dead bird, a child’s funeral, and a discussion about who should die in her book sharpen her conviction that the story must earn its meaning. Her yearning to return to London becomes a struggle for artistic and personal autonomy.

In Los Angeles, 1951, housewife Laura Brown wakes early to bake a birthday cake for her cheerful, unseeing husband, Dan. Pregnant and anxious, she reads Woolf’s novel between errands and attempts at the cake, unsettled by the chasm between the life she performs and the life she feels. A tender, disorienting encounter with her neighbor Kitty intensifies her sense of dislocation. Laura checks into a hotel with pills and a book, contemplating escape; the day ends with her return home, the decision deferred. The screenplay later reveals that after giving birth she will leave her family, a choice that will reverberate for decades.

In present-day New York, book editor Clarissa Vaughan plans a party for her dearest friend and former lover, Richard, a poet ravaged by AIDS who is being honored with a major prize. She buys flowers, fusses over details, navigates tensions with her partner Sally, and fends off the melancholy of time’s passage. Visits from Richard’s ex, Louis, and Clarissa’s daughter deepen the portrait of a chosen family frayed by illness. When Clarissa tries to coax Richard to the celebration, he, unable to endure further, exits his life with a devastating leap. The party dissolves into wake and reckoning.

The strands converge after Richard’s death when an older Laura Brown arrives at Clarissa’s apartment. She is Richard’s long-absent mother, and the script stages their conversation as a collision of two moral imaginations: the pain left by abandonment and the insistence that choosing one’s life can be an act of bleak necessity. Clarissa, shaken, rediscovers a chastened gratitude for the ordinary day.

Structure and motifs
Hare’s screenplay braids the narratives through rapid cross-cutting that matches gestures and objects across eras: flowers bought and arranged, eggs cracked and cakes assembled, water poured and watched, mirrors and windows framing faces that hesitate on thresholds. Refrains from Woolf’s prose and the sound of writing stitch the timelines together. The prologue and epilogue fold Woolf’s farewell into the present, turning her letter into a quiet counterpoint to Clarissa’s late-night resolve.

Themes
The script interrogates how art transforms suffering without denying it; how caregiving both sustains and consumes; how the quest for authenticity collides with obligation. Queer love, often tender and unsentimental, is shown as a site of both refuge and fracture. Time compresses into a single shared day to show continuities in women’s interior lives across a century. Death is not merely an ending but a choice that reshapes the living, compelling them toward attention, toward the flowers, the cake, the party, and the fragile happiness available in the hours that remain.