Running time: 118 minutes
Starring: Vanessa Redgrave, Claire Danes, Toni Collette, Natasha Richardson, Hugh Dancy, Patrick Wilson, Eileen Atkins
Rating 4 out of 10
A glossy Hollywood blockbuster by an award-winning writer and replete with a cast laden with Oscars must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but the end result is a glossy, superficial affair that looks nice on the surface but slowly reveals itself to have very little depth. Evening is based on the bestselling novel by Susan Minot, with a screenplay by the author of The Hours (Michael Cunningham) and directed by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Lajos Koltai. Aimed squarely at the female audience, it's a sort of Camomile Lawn-lite which jumps around in time from the present to events at an upscale New England wedding in the 1950s.
In the present day, Vanessa Redgrave plays Ann Grant, an elderly mother on her deathbed surrounded by her daughters (Toni Collette and Natasha Richardson). Floating in and out of lucidity as her final days approach, Ann makes cryptic references to a mysterious event in her past and one which is very much unknown to her daughters.
Prolonged flashback sequences take us back to the young Ann (Claire Danes) as she attends the wedding of her friend Lila Wittenborn (Mamie Gummer) in her exclusive shoreline family home. Here Ann encounters Lila's rakish brother (Hugh Dancy) as well as the charming if detached Harris (Patrick Wilson), and the three become connnected in a way that filmmakers usually like to tell us 'will change their lives forever'.
It's a very slow-moving piece, and while stylistically it bears some resemblances to Cunningham's novel and film The Hours, as a whole it veers more towards the Catherine Cookson or Mills and Boon approach. Giving Collette and Richardson too much in the way of back story slows it down even further in the modern sequences, as do some weird whimsical touches featuring Eileen Atkins as Redgrave's nurse.
Evening does possess a curous film fact in that two sets of real-life mothers and daughters play the same character at different ages: Meryl Streep - whose appearance towards the end of the film is a welcome breath of fresh air - and her daughter Mamie Gummer, as well as Redgrave and Richardson. But this unconvincing tale of wedding shenanigans is ultimately much ado about nothing.
Paul Hurley
