Uneven Evening Drowns in Sentiment

Ann Lord (Vanessa Redgrave) is dying. Her two beloved daughters, married with children Constance (Natasha Richardson) and single and searching Nina (Toni Collette), hover by her bedside hoping for a miracle. In her drugged stupor, Ann suddenly calls out for a man neither of them has ever heard of before, claiming as she moves in and out of sleep that this mysterious “Harris” was the eternal love of her life.

Thus begins a journey into the past, a melding of fact and fantasy as the elderly mother remembers her youth along with a weekend spent at the Newport wedding of her dearest college friend Lila Wittenborn (Mamie Gummer). Ann (Claire Danes) is to be the Maid of Honor and will sing a song at the reception, but her friend’s irrepressible brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy) think’s the woman’s talent could be put to better use.

He believes Lila does not love her fiancé, is, in fact, in love with someone else, and that someone just happens to be the dashing Harris Arden (Patrick Wilson) of elder Ann’s deathbed murmurings. He’s a small town doctor and friend in town for the wedding who has captured the Wittenborn family’s hearts ever since he was a young child. But, then, everyone who meets Harris tends to fall in love with him, Ann certainly no exception, their emotional entanglement sure to have repercussions effecting the lives of everyone, both in the then and in the now, forever.

Based on the novel by Susan Minot and adapted for the screen by the author and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Michael Cunningham (The Hours), director Lajoz Koltai’s (Fateless) new drama Evening is an atmospheric and elegant melodrama that frustrates nearly as much as it mesmerizes. Even with a plethora of extremely talented women (including real life mother-daughter combos Redgrave and Richardson and Meryl Streep and Gummer) at its core the film is so leisurely paced and so overly sentimental I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to make it all the way through to the end.

But then something magical happens and I forgot why I was so bored and annoyed. Richardson and Collette share a sisterly moment in the former’s living room bringing me to tears, Danes and Wilson belt a luminous duet rousing me from stupor, Redgrave and Eileen Atkins verbally dance one round with such elegiac grace it tickled my emotional center. Best of all is Dancy, the actor so good he rises above all the estrogen to craft a tragically fragile portrait of uncertainty so magnificent it easily ranks as one of the finest supporting performances I’ve seen all year.

Yet Evening remains maddening and annoying much of the way through. From Jan A.P. Kacmarek’s (Finding Neverland) overbearing score, to the way many of the actresses, especially the usually wonderful Collette, play nearly every scene as a BIG EMOTIONAL MOMENT robbing the story of its inherent emotive power. More, the whole thing is layered in sentimentality, at times drowning in it, Koltai and company never able to find the right balance for the melodrama which could have made it a forcefully moving female-driven winner.

I think it is fair to ask what happened. Koltai certainly (a former cinematographer) showed to be no slouch in the director’s chair with his magnificent Hungarian debut Fateless, while Cunningham could quite possibly be one of the best writers of complicated emotionally wrenching stories of women working today. Minot’s original novel borders on magnificence, while actors as good as Streep, Redgrave, Atkins, Collette, Danes, Richardson and Glenn Close should be able to make something like this sing with stirring sincerity.

It just doesn’t happen. While there is much to love (the way Koltai drifts the story from the present day to the remembered past is absolutely sublime), I just don’t think there is enough to push the film above being any better than solidly okay. I wanted to love this movie, desired deeply to be swept away by its swirling theatrical layers of fantasy, memory and factual reality. But it didn’t happen, and by the time things finally came to their forgone conclusion I was more than ready to exit the theater and say goodnight to Evening.

Film Rating:  êê1/2  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

- Interview with Evening director Lajos Koltai by Sara Michelle Fetters