Evening

[Sonic Youth]

Scratch it off for Best Picture, but maybe there will be an acting nod or two?

Evening
By Kirk Honeycutt
Jun 22, 2007
Hollywood Reporter


In "Evening," an all-star team of filmmakers takes on a minor-league story. The cast and crew here include multiple Oscar winners and nominees, a Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter, and a director, a much-honored cinematographer who collaborated with a Nobel Prize-winning author no less for his first film. Alas, the thing they all choose to labor over is a thin, overwrought tale of New England bluebloods wallowing in self-perpetuated angst and recriminations. At the end of the movie, everyone decides to get over it. Wow, that's a relief.

The film will gain traction with older women for all the mother-daughter interplay that pushes emotional buttons without ever saying anything significant. A cast of truly impressive actresses spanning the decades -- Claire Danes, Toni Collette, Eileen Atkins, Glenn Close as well as real-life mother-daughters Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson and Meryl Streep and Mamie Gummer -- will undoubtedly draw a goodly share of the curious as well. Boxoffice for this Focus Feature release should still be modest.

The package is certainly appealing. Budapest-born director Lajos Koltai (the Oscar-nominated Hungarian feature "Fateless") cuts between two visually appealing settings: a high-society wedding on an awesome seacliff home in Newport, R.I., and the final days of the maid of honor from the wedding, a half-century later, in a lovely art and memorabilia-filled Rhode Island residence.

It is in the latter setting that Ann Lord (Redgrave) is dying. She is (barely) comforted by two daughters, a happily situated mother and wife, Constance (Richardson), and her restive sister, Nina (Collette). The flashbacks to the weekend wedding of 50 years earlier -- where all the movie's action is -- take place in the dying woman's mind.

As these events, as fresh as if they were yesterday, churn over in her mind, what they tell her about life and the mistakes people make is meant to hugely impact Nina's current dilemma. Nina is in a shaky three-year-old relationship and, secretly pregnant, is uncertain what to do. But because the daughter can't see the mother's flashbacks or hallucinations, how this message gets across is a mystery.

In her memories, the young Ann (Danes) finds the bride-to-be, Lila Wittenborn (Gummer), in a state. Her engagement is a sham since her true love is longtime family friend and intimate Harris Arden (Patrick Wilson). Within moments, Ann herself falls under Harris' spell. He is destined to become the "man that got away" for both young women.

In her waning moments, it is her obsession with Harris that dominates her thoughts. Harris apparently is a sexual magnet: Before that long-ago weekend concludes, the bride's alcoholic brother and Ann's dear friend, Buddy (Hugh Dancy), makes a pass at her and at Harris!

For some reason, the whole movie and therefore the dying woman's memories focus on that wedding rather than subsequent loves, marriages and daughters. So when she looks back on a life of "waste and failure," you can't judge. What happened afterward in her life is what matters, not that brief fling and a tragic event that forever marred the wedding.

The whole thing is a stacked deck of cards that the director and his writers, Susan Minot and Michael Cunningham ("The Hours"), who adapted Minot's novel, deal with so selectively as to deny us knowledge of essential points about many of the relationships and motives.

Possibly too much has been removed from the source material. Occasional bits of magic realism indicate other means of attack in the novel: Ann's night nurse (Atkins), for example, turns into an angel of mercy/fairy godmother who knows Ann's whole past and hints at alternative views about the supposed waste and failure. We'd also like to know much more about the bride's curiously aloof parents (Barry Bostwick and Close).

Nevertheless, we must be grateful to any film with such glorious actresses still at the top of their game, including Streep, who turns up briefly as Lila the Elder.

"Evening" itself reps a master's course in how to make do on a limited budget, a fabulous cast and Rhode Island's generous tax incentives for filmmakers.

[Sonic Youth]

Evening
By JUSTIN CHANG
Variety

A woman's deathbed reveries provide a poignant but rather obvious counterpoint to her daughters' present-day emotional concerns in "Evening." As co-scripted by Michael Cunningham ("The Hours"), Susan Minot's adaptation of her own artfully fragmented novel arrives onscreen as another highly polished, star-studded meditation on mortality, regret and the unique drag of being a woman in any generation. Strong literary pedigree and powerhouse cast will appeal to sophisticated auds, and Focus Features' mid-summer launch reps a classic bit of counter-programming, but it remains to be seen if pic will get the year-end kudos and critical attention needed for sustained arthouse biz.

After making his directing debut in 2005 with the strikingly beautiful Holocaust drama "Fateless," Hungarian lenser-turned-helmer Lajos Koltai has sailed into decidedly tonier prestige-pic waters with his second feature -- adapted and exec produced by literary heavyweights Minot and Cunningham, and starring actresses such as Vanessa Redgrave, Glenn Close, Eileen Atkins and Meryl Streep, just for starters.

Redgrave plays aging Ann Lord, whose daughters Constance (Natasha Richardson) and Nina (Toni Collette) have gathered at her bedside in her final moments. When Ann mutters a cryptic sentence amid her feverish ramblings ("Harris and I killed Buddy"), pic takes a page from "The Bridges of Madison County," flashing back to a key moment in the 1950s -- as young Ann Grant (Claire Danes), an aspiring singer from New York, arrives on the coast of Rhode Island for the wedding of her friend Lila Wittenborn (Mamie Gummer).

While at the Wittenborns' summer cottage, Ann is entranced by the mild-mannered, powerfully attractive Dr. Harris Arden (Patrick Wilson). Latter exerts a similar pull on his longtime chums Lila -- lovely, insecure and about to marry a decent man she doesn't love -- and Lila's rascally brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy), an aspiring novelist who swings from jovial high spirits to depressive bouts of drunkenness.

As Ann supports Lila through her premarital jitters and explores her attraction to Harris, and Buddy is increasingly racked by boozy fits of self-loathing, the catalysts are in place for a tragedy that becomes the defining moment of Ann's life. Her innocence shattered, she falls into a series of ill-considered (and sparsely depicted) marriages and has two girls, while her singing career flounders.

To freight a single evening with such dramatic significance will rightly smack some viewers as a tad reductive. The more immediate problem with this ambitious, elliptical film is Koltai and editor Allyson C. Johnson's difficulty in establishing a narrative rhythm, as the back-and-forth shifts in time that seemed delicately free-associative on the page are rendered with considerably less grace onscreen. In ways reminiscent of Stephen Daldry's film of "The Hours," the telling connections between past and present feel calculated rather than authentically illuminating (though even with a key character's encroaching demise, "Evening" is overall a less lugubrious affair).

Pic intends to say something meaningful about the emotional legacy mothers bequeath to their daughters, most directly in the scenes between Constance, a happily married mother, and Nina, a restless, somewhat embittered single woman whose failed dancing career reflects her mother's own lost dreams. Though well-played by Richardson and especially Collette, the characters and their sisterly spats feel all too conveniently shaped to reinforce the film's multigenerational themes.

Still, individual moments are not without their felicitous touches -- mainly due to the cast, which is rich to the point of improbability. Though she looks nothing like a young Redgrave, Danes proves engagingly vivacious as the young, bohemian Ann, who's quietly disdained by Lila's socialite mother (Close, in a brief, indelible turn). Gummer's luminous, trembling Lila anchors the film's implicit critique of stiff, upper-class propriety, while Dancy makes a vivid impression in the problematic role of the self-destructive closet case. Atkins brings a no-nonsense warmth to the part of Ann's nurse.

Real-life mother-daughter thesping pairs abound: Redgrave (feeble and senile one minute, wide-awake lucid the next) and Richardson enact their relationship onscreen, and -- in a moment deployed as carefully as a secret weapon -- Streep, Gummer's mother, emerges late in the film for a rewarding extended cameo as the elder Lila.

Koltai brings a cinematographer's eye to the production, with lyrical images -- Redgrave's Ann reclining on a boat dock, or a bedroom suddenly teeming with shimmering moths -- that tend toward the surreal. Lensing by Gyula Pados ("Fateless") shows a studied contrast between the rich luster of the '50s material and the darker contempo footage. Other contributions, including the picturesque locations, production designer Caroline Hanania's meticulous period re-creations and Jan A.P. Kaczmarek's full-bodied score, are pristine.

[Precious Doll]

I saw a trailer of this at the cinema a couple of weeks ago. It looks like a cross between Divine Secrets of the Ya ya Sisterhood & How to Make an American Quilt complete with dying scenes - in others words god damn awful.

My impression, exactly. It looks nothing at all like Fried Green Tomatoes to me.

And the song playing over the end of the trailer, White Flag sung by Dido, which I quite like, doesn't help either.

[Big Magilla]

I saw a trailer of this at the cinema a couple of weeks ago. It looks like a cross between Divine Secrets of the Ya ya Sisterhood & How to Make an American Quilt complete with dying scenes - in others words god damn awful.

My impression, exactly. It looks nothing at all like Fried Green Tomatoes to me.

[flipp525]

Well, Patrick Wilson and Hugh Dancy are fucking hot so I'll see it just for them. It doesn't really look that atrocious to me but, then again, I love the weepy, cross-generational chick flicks. Fried Green Tomatoes is one of my favorite movies.

[Precious Doll]

I saw a trailer of this at the cinema a couple of weeks ago. It looks like a cross between Divine Secrets of the Ya ya Sisterhood & How to Make an American Quilt complete with dying scenes - in others words god damn awful.

[Reza]

I suppose, having read the synopsis below, we can safely put aside the film. No Oscar nods - just the novelty of seeing Streep's daughter in her film debut.

[Penelope]

Tea Leoni? I thought it was Toni Collette? I know editors are talented, but I didn't know they could change a cast member after filming is done!

[Sonic Youth]

Evening
David D'Arcy in New York
18 Jun 2007 04:30
Screendaily

Dir. Lajos Koltai. US. 2007. 117mins.

In Evening, director Lajos Koltai makes his English-language feature debut with an earnest adaptation of Susan Minot's successful novel about a dying woman looking back at the love of her youth. With a dream-team cast of actresses – Vanessa Redgrave, Clare Danes, Meryl Streep, Natascha Richardson, Tea Leoni, Mamie Gummer, and Glenn Close – Evening will draw on the always-underserved women's audience in the US and the UK, and on the many readers of Minot's 1998 novel.

The novelty of seeing two mother-daughter duos playing mothers and daughters in the same film is another drawing card. But despite some fine performances, the filming of Minot's tale (scripted by Minot and Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours) never quite finds the emotional depth that it promises.

The ensemble drama is built on the memories of dying Ann Grant (Redgrave), whose two daughters stand by as she calls out a man's name, Harris, from her deathbed.

The film flashes back to 1953, when an unmarried aspiring jazz singer Ann Lord (Danes) attended the lavish Newport wedding of Lila, a WASPy college friend (Gummer), and fell in love. The bride, smitten with the same young doctor (Patrick Wilson), settles for a rich dull alternative. A drunken accident makes it a tragic night for all but Ann and Harris.

Much of the emotional territory is all too familiar. Woven in and out of the flashbacks of brief intense love are Ann's grown daughters - one married (Richardson, who is Redgrave's daughter), the other frustrated (Leoni) – who learn their mother's secret and measure their lives against hers with chagrin.

In adapting the novel for the screen, Minot and Cunningham whittled the expansive discursive book into a single memory of a dying woman's great love that ultimately fails. Readers of the book may feel short-changed. The screenplay also expands the role of Buddy Winterborn (Dancy), Lila's likeable drunk of a younger brother, who falls hopelessly in love with Ann.

Koltai's direction of his cast (something of a reunion from The Hours) stresses star turns, close-ups, and tense New England family ceremonies. A cameraman by training, he (along with cinematographer Gyula Pados) mixes the palette with sunlit scenes in a spacious seaside cottage (right out of Edward Hopper), candle-lit family gatherings, and the twilight of the Cambridge bedroom where Ann enjoys her last reveries.

Koltai filmed squalid death in Auschwitz and Buchenwald in his first feature, Fateless (adapted from the Holocaust memoir by the Nobel Prize Winner Imre Kertesz). In Evening, death is prettier, with warm wood and all the right fabrics in Caroline Hanania's production design. The Newport house is right out of architectural digest.

Redgrave, horizontal throughout, is remarkably pleasant (as terminal patients go), experiencing the happy death that the audience may be praying for. Yet it's a bit too happy to be believed. As Peter O'Toole's sickly first wife in Venus, another recent role of an ageing woman looking back at love and loss, she struck a poignant balance of vulnerability and humour.

Richardson and Leoni quarreling as their mother lies dying bring a welcome realism to a film that seems to be its own reverie.

Clare Danes's young Ann is bewildering as a jazz singer without edge or experience in her character or her voice, although her performance of Time After Time at the ill-fated wedding shows another dimension to the young actress.

The revelation in Evening is Mamie Gummer, as Lila, the proper poor-little-rich girl who enters fatalistically into an unhappy marriage, as many women in those days did. When she re-enters the picture 50 years later (as Meryl Streep, her own mother) the family resemblance delivers a lot more drama than novelty.

[flipp525]

I saw the preview for this last night. It looks like a cross between How to Make an American Quilt and Fried Green Tomatoes with a little The Hours stuck in for good measure (since half the cast of that film look to be coming together again -- I counted four women in total). What do you all think of its awards prospects? With a cast like that (Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep, Toni Collette, Eileen Atkins, Claire Danes, Patrick Wilson, Glenn Close, etc.), it's hard to ignore come Oscar prediction time. And, my god, casting Mamie Gummer (Meryl's real-life daughter) to play the young Streep character was a great idea. The resemblence is pretty starling. In that wedding gown, especially, she looked like a young Meryl in The Deer Hunter.



Edited By flipp525 on 1178727825