Stephen Daldry's The Hours is a magnificent film, based on Michael Cunningham's book charting how three women's lives in different periods are interwoven and linked. It's beautifully acted, with Nicole Kidman both unrecognisable and extremely good as Virginia Woolf, Julianne Moore as a repressed housewife in 1960s America and Meryl Streep a lesbian book editor in modern-day Manhattan. Eclipsing each of those fine performances for me though is Ed Harris's startling supporting role as a poet and novelist dying of Aids.

The Hours has a slightly chequered musical history, with Stephen Warbeck's original score being thrown out and Philip Glass coming to the film fairly late in the day. His score simply has to be taken on two levels: for the film it is disastrously overwrought, coming close to drowning out everything that is good; on album it is very beautiful. I can understand his approach: obviously it was not appropriate to write in three different styles for the three different periods but a somewhat timeless approach needed to be taken for the film as a whole, but Glass's minimalism (presumably designed to show the never-faltering link between the three stories) comes across as a thick soup that's far too much, far too often. Throughout the film I couldn't help but imagine how a score like Far From Heaven would have made it even better. To make matters worse, the film seems to be spotted almost arbitrarily: music comes and goes at seemingly random intervals.

As I said, the score as a standalone experience is very different. The unending sense of melancholy is really very beautiful; Glass doesn't waver from strings-and-piano through the whole score, but as opposed to its distancing effect on screen, on album it provokes the opposite reaction and draws the listener in, envelops him. It strikes me that as a tone poem based on the novel, this music is an unqualified success; just as a film score, is it a failure.

Cunningham's liner notes say that Glass is his favourite composer and he listened to his music while writing the novel; perhaps the very pieces he listened to are now in the score, because three of the fourteen tracks are based on previous Glass works, and these vary very little from the material in the rest of the score. (All of this makes the Best Original Score nomination seem rather peculiar, regardless of the music's merits or lack thereof in the picture.) Interestingly (and somewhat bizarrely), David Arch's fine piano solos in the film have been edited out and replaced by ones by Michael Riesman. Odd.

Do go and see The Hours, it's probably the finest film of 2002; and do buy the album, one of the finest film music CDs of the year as well. It's only when the two got combined that things went wrong.

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