Chic Flicks: "Evening"

At least as far as the trailer indicated, director Lajos Koltai’s recent film Evening, based on the novel by Susan Minot about a dying elderly woman fixated on the memory of a brief love affair in her twenties, had all the makings of a brilliant movie. For one thing, it’s a production of Focus Features, the folks who brought us Brokeback Mountain and who have a fairly solid track record for releasing creative, well-written projects. Furthermore, one of its producers is Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, and the history of cinema has taught us that the involvement of good fiction writers – Wiliam Faulkner and Graham Greene, for example – can be a good sign for the intellectual quality of a film.  

Most importantly, Koltai’s cast is a dream team of talented actresses at the top of their respective games. Who could have guessed that a movie starring Glenn Close, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Vanessa Redgrave, Natasha Richardson, and Meryl Streep could be anything less than a revelation? Even the most gifted actor or pair of actors can make the occasional blunder in choosing scripts, but it is difficult to imagine that all six of these women, in addition to Cunningham, could have each read over the screenplay without realizing its inanity. For the screenplay is all that is wrong with the film, and it's wrong enough to utterly wreck the whole thing. 

Redgrave, relegated to her deathbed for most of the film, plays Ann Lord in the final stage of her life. The film alternates monotonously between scenes among Ann and her two daughters (Constance, played by Richardson, Redgrave’s real-life daughter, and Nina, played by Collette), and flashbacks to the adventures of young Ann (Danes). Young Ann falls in love with a man named Harris (Patrick Wilson) at the Newport wedding of her best friend Lila Wittenborn. Mamie Gummer plays the young Lila in these flashback sequences, and perhaps the only enjoyment the film has to offer is the opportunity to marvel at how much she resembles her mother, Streep, who plays the elderly Lila and shows up near the end of the film to visit Ann before she dies. 

No characters are particularly interesting, though Claire Danes has terrifically groomed hair. Stereotypes abound in the flashback segments – the drunken, misunderstood, sexually frustrated New England rich boy (Lila’s brother, Buddy, played by Hugh Dancy); the unhappy bride getting married for security’s sake; the bohemian New York songstress. Redgrave’s daughters, too – the blonde soccer mom Constance (her name entailing unforgivably trite symbolism) and the ne’er-do-well free spirit Nina – are egregiously flat in this regard. 

To describe the film’s structure as “tedious” would be an understatement. And some moments in the movie could be mistaken for farce; my favorite is when Redgrave’s nurse (Eileen Atkins), eschewing her usual cardigan, appears in a fairy godmother costume, a sort of prom dress with white sequins and a tulle wrap, presumably as one of Redgrave’s imaginings. 

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