Notes

Laura, who is depressed and agitated, is reading ''Mrs. Dalloway'' on the same day she is baking a birthday cake for her husband, Dan (John C. Reilly), a blunt, hale World War II veteran who dotes on her and barely notices her anguish. Observing and absorbing Laura's distress is her timid, fiercely clinging young son, Richie (Jack Rovello). While baking the cake, Laura receives a surprise visit from a brightly perky neighbor, Kitty (Toni Collette), who is about to go into the hospital to be tested for cancer and admits she's frightened.

Meanwhile, in New York, Clarissa Vaughan (named after Woolf's character) is planning a celebration for her closest friend, Richard Brown (Ed Harris), a poet in the advanced stages of AIDS who has just won a prestigious award. As the movie folds these stories together, it emerges that Richard is Laura's grown-up son. And in a huge risk that pays off, the movie gives the dying poet a sudden flashback to the scared little boy he was (and fundamentally still is). Another bold surreal touch imagines Laura lying on a bed that's suddenly engulfed by the river that took Woolf.

Clarissa and Richard were lovers when they were younger, but both eventually chose partners of the same sex.
Clarissa has lived for years with a woman, Sally Lester (Allison Janney), and has a college-age daughter, Julia (Claire Danes), from an unknown sperm donor.
Woolf herself was attracted to both men and women, and although her literary alter ego

It is at times soaring and sumptuous, other times melancholy and contemplative and occasionally unsettling and haunting

Leonard Woolf, querying his wife about her decision to kill off a character in ''Mrs. Dalloway,'' asks her why.
She answers carefully, ''Someone has to die that the rest of us should value life more.''

Directed by Stephen Daldry; written by David Hare, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham;