Evening: Movie Review (2007) by Christopher Smith

The new Lajos Koltai movie, "Evening," is loosely based on the 1998 novel by Susan Minot, who lives in North Haven, from a screenplay Minot adapted with Michael Cunningham, who wrote the novel "The Hours,” which was successfully turned into the 2002 movie of the same name. Just as in that film, "Evening" touts the sort of cast that’s so revered, it tends to generate a groundswell of excitement.

That downside of that, of course, are the high expectations that go along with it.
Featured here are Vanessa Redgrave and her real-life daughter Natasha Richardson, Meryl Streep and her real-life daughter Mamie Gummer, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Eileen Atkins and Glenn Close. Hardly a sorry bunch.

Add to this mix Hugh Dancy and Patrick Wilson, and you have an intoxicating brew, so much so that going into the movie, you think that with so much talent pressing for attention, certainly the film won't be lacking in energy.

But it is. The movie is a long crawl toward death, literally, and while the acting can be very good, particularly in a scene Streep shares with Redgrave toward the end, only moments are remarkable. The film follows suit.

The movie stars Redgrave as Ann Lord, a 65-year-old woman dying of cancer who is stuck in bed for most of the film while her memory finds its footing and stumbles to the regret of a passion unfulfilled. Watching over her is a concerned nurse (Atkins) and Ann's two daughters (Richardson, Collette), each of whom is working through their own issues while Ann drifts back to a time when, she murmurs, "Harris and I killed Buddy."

Just how is revealed in an extended series of flashbacks that complicate the film unnecessarily, and which give all involved reasons to heave and sigh.

We meet Ann (played by Danes) in her youth. A singer from New York, she has traveled to Rhode Island (not to Maine, as in the book) to attend the wedding of her longtime friend, Lila Wittenborn (Gummer, whose resemblance to her mother is the most striking element of the movie). There, Ann meets Dr. Harris Arden (Wilson), with whom she has an affair that upsets the other man in her life, poor drunken Buddy (Dancy), a confused writer barely mentioned in the book whose sexuality becomes a plot point.

Casually, the movie swings through the decades, checking in with each of its characters as Koltai works overtime to sew up their stories and what they might mean at the end of one woman's life.

Cunningham was charged with the job of rewriting a script Minot labored over, and so it was his hand that drew down the shade on what the book was, and thus what the movie could have become. "Evening" is, in the end, a movie written by novelists who don't want to succumb to the visual if it means sacrificing a single word. And yet they must. As such, the film is a fine example of what works within the pages of a book doesn't necessarily work onscreen, particularly when the book in question is as dense as Minot’s, and apparently as fragile.

Grade: C+