Evening (2007)
Directed by Lajos Koltai
Written by Susan Minot, Michael Cunningham
Starring Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Patrick Wilson, Hugh Dancy, Mamie Gummer, Glenn Close
Release Date June 29th, 2007
Published June 30th, 2007
Some films just look like Oscar movies. They carry a certain weight of subject matter and location that gives the film the pretense of quality. That pretense accompanies the movie Evening which features an all star cast, including Claire Danes, Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep and Toni Collette, a gorgeous seaside location that films like a travelogue, and the subject of life, death and regret, the ingredients of a deep dramatic story.
With all of that quality in place all that is needed is a story to tie it together. Sadly, a good story is exactly what is missing from Evening. What is in place of a good story is a melodrama ranking somewhere between Lifetime movie and WB network teen drama.
Lying in her deathbed, Ann (Vanessa Redgrave) is flashing in and out of conscousness and flashing back to the night that changed her life forever. Fifty years earlier Ann (Claire Danes) was a bright eyed bohemian with dreams of becoming a famous singer. For now she is visiting the Newport home of her best friend Lila (Mamie Gummer) who is about to be married.
Whether Lila really wants to marry Carl (Timothy Kiefer) is in question, but she will marry him. This will happen despite the drunken protest of her brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy) who implores Ann to try and stop his sister from marrying without love. Buddy himself is holding on to a love that can never be, a confused attraction to both Ann and a handsome man from his and Lila's past named Harris (Patrick Wilson).
Harris arrives at the wedding as the guest everyone is watching. Lila and he had a brief flirtation when she was just a girl and then there are Buddy's complicated feelings. Things get even murkier when Harris falls for Ann and the two spend a torrid night together that ends in tragedy when one of the other main characters suffers a major injury.
In the modern story, Toni Collette and Natasha Richardson play Ann's daughters. As they hover at their mother's bedside they represent the dual tracks of Ann's life. Collette's Nina is a boho chick with a rocker boyfriend and an ambivalence about marriage and commitment. Richardson's Connie is a typical soccer mom with the minivan and the 2.3 kids. Both are the lives that Ann lived and regretted in her time.
Director Lajos Koltai spent years as a Cinematographer on such well photographed films as Being Julia, The Emporer's Club and Sunshine and he brings that same painterly eye to the look of Evening. How unfortunate that he didn't bring the same attention to detail to the films confused plot and confusing characters.
Evening has the air, the pretension of a prestige picture. It has an all star cast and a well appointed location. It has a grand, sweeping timeline and the hint of depth given to any movie that deals so directly with death. This depth however, is never earned by the story but expected by it. We are just supposed to assume because the pieces are in place for great drama, that great drama is unfolding before us. That is simply not the case.
What unfolds before us is the kind of movie the Lifetime network might make if they had the budget for this kind of starpower. It's a film that is not without its charm and even a few moments of honest drama, most courtesy of the wonderful Toni Collette who overcomes an underwritten character and delivers the only moments close to true drama.
The rest of the film is a confusing melange of mixed motivations, confusing character twists and even more confused timelines. Then there is poor Vanessa Redgrave whose unassailable dignity is put to the test as she is subjected to a number of humiliating fever dream fantasies. These scenes are so embarrassing that you stop feeling for the character and start feeling for poor Ms. Redgrave as she shuffles about in her nightgown.
It's interesting to note that Mamie Gummer who plays the young Lila is the daughter of Meryl Streep who plays the older Lila in cameo late in the film. Similarly, Natasha Richardson plays one of Vanessa Redgrave's daughters in the film and of course happens to be Ms. Redgrave's real life daughter. I mention these tidbits because there is so little else of interest here.
The biggest obstacle to this film working, aside from the first time director with the mixed up script, is the wooden, sullen performance of Patrick Wilson as Harris. After a near Oscar level performance as Kate Winslet's eye candy in Little Children, Wilson returns to the form that made him a hammy punchline in Phantom of the Opera.
His Harris is supposed to be the man who inspires to different women's fantasies for the rest of their lives. However, I can't imagine any woman remembering this Harris long after he's walked out of a room, let alone for their rest of their life. Stuffy, stuck up and just a tad bit creepy, Harris couldn't inspire bad poetry, forget inspiring a lifetime of fantasy and regret.
Then there is Hugh Dancy as Buddy who goes the opposite way from Patrick Wilson. Buddy is the typical movie drunk always ready to make everyone uncomfortable with a few fumbling words or a tumble in the middle of the room. His love for both Harris and Ann is played as a side effect of his drunken stupor and does nothing to make him sympathetic, rather just simply pathetic.
Meanwhile Claire Danes, Mamie Gummer, Toni Collette and Natasha Richardson deliver performances that in a better movie would radiate great warmth, humor and charm. Each of these lovely actresses aquit themselves as well as they possibly can within the messy narrative of Evening with only Collette emerging as the punky younger, or was she older? One of the many miscues of the movie, I couldn't figure out if she was the younger or older sister of Ann's two daughters. Scenes point to two different conclusions.
Nevertheless, Collette's punky, spirited, sad performance is the one consistent source of honest drama in Evening.
The payoff of Evening is a scene that puts two of our greatest actresses together for one scene. As Vanessa Redgrave's Ann lay dying, in walks Meryl Streep as her former best friend Lila. The film has been building to this scene, the director has kept Streep offscreen to this moment so we could have this scene.
As we wait and watch as Lila arrives to relieve her friend of so many of the burdens she has been dreaming of throughout her convalescence we find that nothing really gets resolved. The scene devolves into a mutual fantasy of Harris, the man who could not inspire a bird to fly if he threw it off a cliff. Then the film simply ends. Ending with the abruptness of sudden death.
I'm not giving anything away here, the point of the film is a frank discussion of dying. There was not going to be any last minute reprieve for Ann who is old and frail and ready to die. However, we really aren't ready for her to go. We long for a little resolution, a mention of what the film was really about. Certainly we did not just waste two hours of our life watching this woman remember a wet blanket like Harris?
There must have been something richer and deeper than that. Sadly there isn't and that is the disaster of Evening.
