A copy of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours, shows up in Talk to Her. Superficially, it's a brief homage to the book to which Pedro Almodóvar declares a near spiritual "devotion," and which, he says on his website, "film producers should better leave alone." More complexly, it hints at themes shared by his film and the novel: devotion, depression and obsession, and especially the ways that women are shaped, hindered and occasionally even inspired by the masculine structures and expectations that engulf them.

Even for these thematic correlations, the movie of The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry and scripted by David Hare, is about as different from an Almodóvar film as might be imagined. Where Almodóvar tends to expand and even exaggerate emotional trajectories, Daldry (Billy Elliot) tends to work in meticulous rhythms and scaled-down images. His film translates the book's complex organization -- three women in different times and places, each struggling with depression and desire -- as a kind of puzzle, each piece interlocking. Essentially three separate films, The Hours deploys clever matching shots to shift between them and Philip Glass' famously relentless scoring to underline their thematic fluidity.

The movie opens on the suicide of Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), in the London suburb of Richmond, 1941. She writes a note to her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), dons her plaid wool coat, then walks down to the river, where she puts stones in her pockets and wades in. From here the film cuts back in time, to 1923, as Woolf is writing Mrs. Dalloway, feeling intimidated by her maids, visiting with her sister, Vanessa Bell (Miranda Richardson), and her children and confronting her own evolving madness.

The second story takes place in 1951 Los Angeles, where housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is reading Mrs. Dalloway, and in the process, facing doubts concerning her marriage to gentle Dan (John C. Reilly), for whom she and her young son (Jack Rovello) endeavor to make a birthday cake. This section begins as Dan buys his wife flowers, an effort to nudge her mood: He sees her melancholy, but has no concept of how to help, or even talk with her. For her part, Laura is seriously considering Mrs. Dalloway's example, planning not only her husband's party, but also her suicide.

The third piece, set in 2001 Manhattan, follows Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) as she puts together a party for ex-lover Richard (Ed Harris), a novelist now dying of AIDS-related illness. Helped by her infinitely patient life partner, Sally (Allison Janney), and their daughter Julia (Claire Danes), Clarissa bustles about her day, resisting the fact that Richard is coming to grips with his own devastating grief, his regrets and needs.

Much of The Hours is about grief, focused through the prism of women oppressed by culturally ordained and personally absorbed obligations. Laura's neighbor, Kitty (luminous Toni Collette), confesses that she has a growth in her uterus. Looking on Laura's son and current pregnancy, she frets that you can't "call yourself a woman until you're a mother." With this, Laura's sense of guilt (why is she depressed when she has everything Kitty wants?) and desire overwhelm her: She kisses Kitty, who panics, reverting to housewifey chitchat and hustling out the door.

Laura's desperation and isolation recall Woolf's, of course. Neither can express her sexual yearning outright, and neither can resolve her situation, please herself and those who love her. Laura, for all her efforts to kill herself (which result in a bizarrely over-the-top scene in which she imagines her own Woolf-inspired drowning), eventually leaves her family, for which she is, unsurprisingly, judged severely. Woolf's fate is fixed in history. Even she seems resigned to it, telling Leonard that she can no longer bear living in virtual seclusion outside the city, despite his best intentions to protect her. "Only I can understand my own condition," she contends.

The Hours seems undecided as to whether it believes her. Its female subjects are, on one hand, unfathomable prisms of passion, rendered in brilliant performances. But they're also functions of a coherent narrative, made comprehensible as embodiments of historical patterns. In this way, the film indicts, rather broadly and unimaginatively, patriarchal oppressions, especially as these lead to diagnoses of individual deviance -- say, lesbianism. As sensitive as Leonard, Richard or even Dan might strive to be, he just can't get it: Women's stuff remains mysterious. This seems somehow reductive, political oppression creating an insular emotional world where culpability and generosity may never be known.

Or maybe not. The film's single wholly selfless gesture is made by Julia, the youngest character. Near film's end, she embraces Richard's elderly mother, suffering unspeakable guilt and feeling judged by Clarissa. In this moment, Julia acknowledges the older woman's otherness and asks nothing in return. Coming after "hours" of interiority, it's splendidly, surprisingly expansive.

The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry, a Paramount release, opens Friday at The Bridge