Bloomsbury to Beverly Hills

The big winner at the Golden Globes was The Hours, starring Nicole Kidman and inspired by the life of Virginia Woolf. But who'd have thought that Hollywood could fall in love with the bitchy queen of 20th-century modernism?

At the Golden Globes ceremony in Hollywood on Sunday night, the prize for Best Motion Picture Drama went to The Hours, a film in which three melancholy women contemplate or watch or perform the act of suicide. The award for Best Actress went to Nicole Kidman for her portrayal in the film of the writer Virginia Woolf, a performance that has far more silences in it than words. Surrounded by competition from the ritzy musical, Chicago, the vividly brutal Gangs of New York, the second Lord of the Rings epic and Jack Nicholson's comedy About Schmidt, the £12.5m British film directed by Stephen Daldry seemed to have come from a different world. But it has found favour not just with the Globes jurors. It featured in the 10 Best Films of the Year lists in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. And it's a strong contender for this year's Best Film Oscar.

But what in the name of reason are Hollywood and Virginia Woolf doing in the same sentence? Are they not, as philosophers say, mutually exclusive sets or categories? On one side, the brilliant, brittle, snobbish, bitchy, sexually null, mentally unstable Mrs Woolf, the prima donna assoluta of 20th-century women writers; on the other, the cinema of excess and surfaces, of head-spinning extravagance, computerised special effects, razzle-dazzle musical numbers and Sam Goldwyn's brilliantly philistine dismissal: "Messages are for Western Union."

How could Virginia and Hollywood ever have a relationship? She deals in prose that aspires to inscrutable poetry; she charts rarified states of mind, subtle shifts of memory and impression. Hollywood's favourite movies are happier dealing with physical externals; brawling in gangs, fighting lions in ancient Rome, bombing Pearl Harbor. Can it be true that, all over Beverly Hills, producers will be lifting the phone and buying the options to The Waves? What is it about Virginia that has so triumphantly blown up the skirts of Tinseltown?

Woolf herself was not a fan of movies. In a 1926 essay called "The Cinema", she wrote: "The art of the cinema seems a simple, and even a stupid art. That is the King, shaking hands with a football team; that is Sir Thomas Lipton's yacht; that is Jack Horner winning the Grand National. The eye licks it all up instantaneously and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think." She was scathing about adaptations of literary works for the big screen, and the dumbing process that inevitably resulted. "The brain knows Anna [Karenina] almost entirely by the inside of her mind – her charm, her passion, her despair – whereas all the emphasis [on screen] is now laid upon her teeth, her pearls and her velvet... So we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world. So we spell them out in words of one syllable written in the scrawl of an illiterate schoolboy. A kiss is love. A smashed chair is jealousy. A grin is happiness. And death is a hearse." (It's as well she wasn't around to witness television and the vandalisms of Andrew Davies.)

But she had a moment of unusual clairvoyance, when wondering about the metaphorical language that film-makers would be forced to develop. "It seems plain," she wrote, "that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression." What it had to do most urgently, she concluded, was to find a way of making thought, and the passage of thoughts, visible.

In her own books, thought reigns supreme over plot, narrative, dialogue and, for want of a better word, action. Mrs Woolf's nine novels are conspicuously devoid of event – except for Orlando, her phantasmagorical tableau vivant of English life since Elizabethan days, where many things happen, including the hero's change of sex halfway through.

Hollywood has coped successfully before with famous writers whose work is disobligingly plot-free. One thinks of EM Forster, Woolf's contemporary (A Passage to India was published a year before Mrs Dalloway) and her peer in evoking how the educated Georgian middle classes think and feel. Under the creative skill of the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala team, Forster's social comedies of buttoned-up British vacationers in Italy and well-bred bluestockings trysting with social inferiors could seem vividly dramatic. But the film world has been more wary of Woolf. Sally Potter's 1992 version of Orlando was, said Time Out, "a love poem to both Woolf and the England that made us". Eileen Atkins's 1997 adaptation of Mrs Dalloway, starring Vanessa Redgrave, was respectfully reviewed but a flop at the box-office. So the success of The Hours requires some explanation.

Although The Hours was Virginia's working title for what became Mrs Dalloway, the film is not a treatment of a Woolf novel. It's an adaptation of the American author Michael Cunningham's book The Hours, which tells the stories of three women: Virginia Woolf and her immediate family circle – husband Leonard and sister Vanessa – in the crucial year of 1923, when she began writing Mrs Dalloway; Laura Brown, a terminally bored American wife and mother, becalmed in the dead suburbs of Los Angeles in 1946; and Clarissa Vaughan, a successful literary agent in modern-day Manhattan, who plays ministering angel to her ex-lover Richard, now a gay novelist dying of Aids but recently awarded a major book prize.

Laura is surrounded by the trappings of the postwar American consumer dream, but cannot stand to sleep with her husband any more, and nurses a guilty lesbian passion for her glamorous neighbour. Clarissa, in 2001, has a grown-up daughter but now keeps house with her feisty gay partner, Lily, and spends much of her day fencing in hopeless conversational loops with her doomed ex-lover, for whom she is throwing a party to celebrate his prize – assuming he can conquer his aversion for appearing in company. Clear so far?

Only a obsessive fan of soap operas could muster much enthusiasm for the modern drama – will Richard make the party? Will his ex-boyfriend be there? Will everyone get on? Who cares? But what gives the film its considerable energy is the presence of a fictional ghost: Mrs Dalloway. Virginia is writing her story, as a vindication of her own life, her newly grown-up self; Laura is an obsessive reader of the book and takes from it both a rejection of her conventional, domestic, heterosexual life and an impulse to kill herself in a bleak hotel room; Clarissa bears the same Christian name as the eponymous heroine and unconsciously shadows the fictional text by speaking in Mrs Dalloway's voice.

It is, I think, unprecedented for a mainstream movie to depend so heavily on the audience's familiarity with a novel from the crucible of English modernism. That such a self-consciously literary work should be the engine of the plot – a book so powerful that it supposedly transforms the lives of these women, and steers them into sexual inversion, existential gloom and thoughts of suicide – is nothing short of miraculous.

Why does it work? Partly, it's the biographical element, and partly the romantic conceit that literature can affect lives terminally. The most affecting parts of the movie are undoubtedly those between Nicole Kidman (as Virginia) and Stephen Dillane (as her husband, Leonard). They are a well-matched couple. He is the busy, hands-on, metal-plate-manipulating proprietor of the Hogarth Press. She is the neurotic priestess upstairs. He worries that she never eats enough and suggests they have a nice husband-and-wife lunch together. She looks at him uncomprehendingly; she is full of an unwritten novel, and her waters are about to break. He prints the words of modern poets on his elderly hand-press and worries about spelling mistakes; she leaves him suicide notes, in perfect Italic script. He is a commonsensical man of action; she is a supine devotee of the Styx, the death river she longs to cross into oblivion. Their edgy domestic existence represents a marriage of life-force and death wish, in which the latter is triumphant.

The film opens and closes with a distracted Virginia filling her pockets with stones and walking, with calm deliberation, into the river Ouse where she drowned herself in 1941. It's a scene dripping with romanticism: suicide has never seemed such an attractive style-choice. Elsewhere in the film, the pull of self-destruction hovers behind the figures of Laura, the bored, Los Angelena Mrs Dalloway fan, and behind Richard, the Aids-victim poet. What should, by rights, be a depressing theme is here given a gloss of existential excitement – as if the dissatisfaction we all feel with our lives needs only a book, a bleak afternoon, a failed conversation and a degree of flamboyant self-pity to tip us all into the final encounter with pills, or a river, or an open window.

In Mrs Dalloway, which the film presents as a magic, life-changing text, there's a constant subtextual debate about the point of being alive. Clarissa Dalloway, the well-heeled, hypersensitive, party-loving wife of a doltish MP, registers a thousand shocks of excitement about the beating heart of London, with its street costermongers, its flower shops and trams and Big Ben striking the hours; but she wonders how much it matters that she has to die one day, and have it all go on without her. How cheap is life anyway, to someone in the grip of depression? The novel's second most important character, Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked First World War soldier, prowls the pages like a mad Cassandra, crying woe, seeing the whole London social scene through hallucinating eyes as a society on the verge of collapse. Having survived the war, he is convinced he has "committed an appalling crime and been condemned to death by human nature" as the voices in his head persuade him he must kill himself.

Like no film before, The Hours presents these cheerful impulses as entirely normal, if extreme, responses to the difficult business of living. And it does so by the depiction of human thought. Laura Brown's suburban angst is conveyed by Julianne Moore in a series of close-ups of her alarming eyes – pleading, liquefying, filled with teary frustration that she was just not cut out for this life – in which we can follow the silent narrative of her despair. Meryl Streep's ministering angel Clarissa is a buoyant and kind woman who nonetheless finds herself tiptoeing around subjects with Richard, her dying ex-lover. The air is full of things not being said. When Richard suddenly kisses her on the mouth, whole pages of their unspoken relationship course through your mind.

Back in the 1920s, Virginia's silences and distracted replies to the servants encourage us to supply an alternative soundtrack of her thoughts. When she kisses her sister Vanessa in a sudden passion, you can feel a great repressed wave of unsaid words bursting from her. She and Leonard communicate in careful, subtle dialogue, as she tries to express her dislike at being confined in Richmond rather than left to her own devices in London, and he tries to guess how close she is to insanity. When their muted antiphon finally cracks asunder on a station platform, and they scream blue murder at each other about care and responsibility, it's as shocking as watching a train crash – and strangely liberating, after 90 minutes of simmering, sotto voce secrecy.

The shadow that Virginia Woolf casts is a melancholy one. Her life and her writing suggest a terrible truth; that you can have the most brilliant, sensitive mind, more urgently alive to the profusion of beauty in the world, more attuned than anybody else's to the subtle negotiations that flow between human beings – but when you feel it tipping over into madness, your only response is to kill yourself. Mrs Dalloway is used in the film as a talisman, offering Laura Brown the most radical alternatives – lesbianism, escape, suicide – to her bourgeois life. And perhaps the most important lesson for Hollywood – something for which Daldry will be remembered – is that you can take the stream of human consciousness and dramatise it, provided you have sufficient trust in the audience.

In the 1926 essay on the cinema, Virginia Woolf allowed herself a grudging optimism about what films might do. She imagined a specific filmic language, an image-bank of symbols and potent abstractions that could directly communicate feelings: "And once this prime difficulty is solved, once some new symbol for expressing thought is found, the film-maker has enormous riches at his command. Physical realities, the very pebbles on the beach, the very quivers of the lips, are his for the asking."

How strangely prescient of Virginia Woolf to anticipate the arrival of a cinema of thought with The Hours. She even threw in the detail about the stones that weighed down the pockets of her overcoat, as she sank into the embracing waters of the river Ouse in 1941.

'The Hours' is released on 14 February