Evening

Evening is a film aiming for hazy nostalgia but that more accurately delivers limp, creaky melodrama. It stars Vanessa Redgrave as a dying woman named Ann who in her final hours begins to reminisce about her "first mistake," an event that slowly (very slowly) unravels in flashbacks/dreams starring Claire Danes as a younger Ann. It probably wouldn't be such a travesty to give away exactly what happened on the evening in question that proved so memorable for Ann on her deathbed, but I'll still keep the details to a minimum. What's established very quickly is that Ann, a struggling singer at that time, arrived at the wedding of her best friend Lila (Mamie Gummer) with some questions as to whether she was marrying the right man. These same questions occurred to Lila's troubled, alcoholic brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy) who shares an even closer bond with Ann. Buddy insists that Lila has always been in love with Harris, (Patrick Wilson) the son of the former housekeeper at their Newport summer mansion. What follows is a play by play of Lila's wedding and the days leading up to it bounced back and forth and sandwiched between the story of the dying Ann years later muttering indecipherable phrases to her adult daughters Nina (Toni Collette) and Constance (Natasha Richardson). We also get brief glimpses of a delusional Ann hallucinating a bit with fireflies and an angelic night nurse that make very little, if any, sense. It's all part of a very deep flaw in the film which is that it's too exacting to be the kind of atmospheric experience it seems like it wants to be, making all its flourishes feel like wasted, frustrating stylizations. Each time the story shifts from a dream to a memory, from a memory to the present day, it feels like an awkward jolt. It's just too rigid a film to pull off a fluid, undistracting sway from place to place, time to time.

The characters in the film also leave a lot to be desired, particularly Harris whose charms are the most spoken of but the least developed. He inspires the attractions of Ann, Lila, and Buddy all together in drooling unison but Wilson, who has done great work in other films, does hardly anything besides stand still and be polite. If you expect an audience to believe that an entire family could go up in smoke over an obsession with one man, then you have to really explain the thing about him that's wild enough to secure such affections. He's not the only one, though. Every character comes with a somewhat unfinished edge in which we see them clearly in one moment only to see them behave irrationally in the next. They all seem to have been underwritten in the leap from the page to screen. (Evening is based on Susan Minot's novel of the same name.) With more page space maybe their very convoluted decisions could be fleshed out satisfactorily, but here too many characters, particularly Ann, seem utterly confounding in their final moments in the past scenes.

The present day scenes work much better as a general rule with some satisfying meditations on mortality and the sad, sudden, mundane qualities of death. Ann's demise spells new beginnings for her two daughters and Redgrave shares truly moving scenes with Collette, Richardson, and featured player Meryl Streep as an adult Lila (taking over for her similar looking daughter Gummer in the role).

I can't say this was a terrible movie. It's just the sort of film that has too few brilliant moments too far between. There are scenes of outstanding quality and a number of exceptional performances, but for every scene that sparkles there's a well-meaning dud just around the corner. Too little works here to really make it a worthwhile film.

Grade: C+