Spuren eines Lebens

Evening tells a story worth hearing but unfortunately it gets lost along the way. There's too much focus on the present - not just Vanessa Redgrave's performance as the older Ann but mostly the subplot regarding her children. It's necessary to come to the present at times so that we can see how what has happened in the past has affected her and how she chooses to remember but the rest of it just weighs the film down without complementing it as it was meant to. The performances in the present scenes also lack the same elegance as those that take place in the past. Collette is a great actress but she and her boyfriend's actor both give average performances that just get in the way. The story that takes place in the past dealing with love, identity, and choice all within a few days time is where the film truly shines. Danes, of course, gives a great performance but Dancy is the one who steals the spotlight with what I feel should've garnered him a nomination for supporting actor at the Academy awards. The story is eloquent, melancholy, and can be felt as well as understood from deeper thought. If it weren't so muddled by what takes place in the present then it could've been a great film but as it stands with the way it is I can only call it good but not great. Another point of interest is the film's score which is just absolutely beautiful. So if you want to see a good movie then Evening is for you - just don't expect every piece to be wondrous as the wonder occurs in the past and is watered down by the present. That's just how I felt about it.

For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: "It might have been!" John Greenleaf Whittier

Evening is dominated by regret, saturated so completely I regret having seen the film. Well, not quite, but rarely has a film had such an accomplished cast and high-class writing pedigree and disappointed me so thoroughly. The regret theme is hammered home so superficially I was driven to try to remember lines from The Great Gatsby to mitigate my growing anger at being treated by the filmmakers as if I could not endure subtlety or ambivalence.

In other words, I got it from the first scene where Vanessa Redgrave looks out over her Newport memory at her young self (Claire Danes) and begins what have to be the easiest lines she's ever had playing an aging romantic: "Why didn't I marry Harris?" The variations on this theme in the movie are legion, even when it's not the young doctor, played by Patrick Wilson, whom her friend, Lila (Mamie Gummer—looking very much like her aunt, Meryl Streep), also regrets not marrying.

One of my major problems is that it's never clear why these substantial women spent so much emotional coin on a character we never get to know, except for his Paul Newmanish good looks. But like the rest of the regret-laden characters, this film spends no dramatic coin on depth—all is skating on the surface, letting us do the sub-textual work rather than the dialogue. In the coda, Old Lila (Streep) makes an attempt at character deconstruction by saying about women, "We are mysterious creatures." Give me a break; could I have a bit more than platitude?

A regrettable life is Buddy's (Hugh Dancy), Lila's drunken, poetic brother, who tries to prevent Lila from marrying the wrong man (not Buddy), whom Buddy loves also, but then this gay sub-theme is never explored beyond a drunken kiss. Nothing in this film is explored except maybe its shameless borrowing from Gatsby without a modicum of understanding that his loss was not just of a woman but of a class struggle, a dying age, and self worth. For Ann, it's just Harris.

The cars are shiny period antiques, the house is beyond the reach of anyone in the audience, and the insights into smart women facing loss are none. Thank goodness for the arrival of evening, when the real stars are the lights in the firmament, not the rich wailing for their lost loves.

I caught Evening in the cinema with a lady friend. Evening is a chick flick with no apologies for being such, but I can say with some relief that it's not so infused with estrogen that it's painful for a red-blooded male to watch. Except for a single instance at the very end of the movie, I watched with interest and did not have to turn away or roll my eyes at any self-indulgent melodrama. Ladies, for their part, will absolutely love this movie.

Ann Lord is elderly, bed-ridden and spending her last few days on Earth as comfortably as possible in her own home with her two grown daughters at her side. Discomfited by the memories of her past, Ann suddenly calls out a man's name her daughters have never heard before: Harris. While both of her daughters silently contemplate the significance of their mother's strong urge to recall and redress her ill-fated affair with this mysterious man at this of all times, Ann lapses back in her head to the fateful day she met Harris - and in doing so, lost the youthful optimism for the future that we all inevitably part ways with.

Both Ann and her two daughters - one married with children, one a serial "commitophobe" - struggle with the central question of whether true love really exists, and perhaps more importantly, if true love can endure the test of time. Are we all one day fated to realize that love never lasts forever? Will we all realize that settling for the imperfect is the only realistic outcome? The subtle fact that the aged Ann is still wrestling with an answer to these questions on her deathbed is not lost on her two daughters.

The cinematography for Evening is interesting - most of the film is spent in Ann's mind as she recalls the past, and for that reason I think the film was shot as if it was all deliberately overexposed, to give everyone an ethereal glow (and thus make it very obvious that all of this is not real, but occurred in the past). Claire Danes is beautiful (appearing to be really, really tall, though just 5' 5" in reality), and is absolutely captivating in one climactic scene where her singing talents are finally put to the test.

You can't really talk trash about the cast, which leads off with Claire Danes and doesn't let up from there: Vanessa Redgrave, Patrick Wilson, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close fill out the other major and minor roles in the film.

I can't really say anything negative about this film at all, though Hugh Dancy's struggle to have his character emerge from utter one-dimensionality is in the end a total loss. Playing the spoiled, lovable drunk offspring of the obscenely rich who puts up a front of great bravado but is secretly scared stiff of never amounting to anything probably doesn't offer much in the way of character exploration - he had his orders and stuck to them.

In the end, gentlemen, your lady friend will most certainly weep, and while you'll likely not feel nearly as affected, the evening will definitely not be a waste for the time spent watching Evening. Catch it in theatres or grab it as a rental to trade off for points for when you want to be accompanied to a viewing of Die Hard 4 or the upcoming Rambo flick. It'll be your little secret that this viewing didn't really cost you much at all.

Evening is the beautiful story of the flawed love of a mother. The movie split in time, is magically shot, amazingly acted and has a touching script. Vanessa Redgrave plays Anne Grant Lord, a woman sun-setting out of life. Lying in her bed, her mind remembering and misfiring, she recalls her first mistake. Claire Danes plays the young Anne, giving a youthful vitality to dying bed ridden woman. Daughters Nina (Toni Collette) and Constance (Natasha Richardson) try to decipher the real story from the disheartening dementia. Her first mistake revolves around Harris Arden (Patrick Wilson); the man her best friend Lila (Mamie Gummer) deeply loved. The daughters must come to terms with their mother's past, and their futures. The cast is glowing in Evening. The collective acting energy of this movie could have powered the equipment for the production of this entire film. I am so glad to see Claire Danes working again, especially in this role. She is so young, and alive, fully living the joys, mistakes and heartbreak of young Anne's first mistake. This is a true feat when you realize she is playing a woman, dying in bed. When her life overwhelms her, you can feel her desire to crack and her hopeless hope that she won't. Some of her facial expressions grinded on me a little, but over all her performance was so radiant, I was left with that only as a side note. Toni Collette continues to prove that you can be a powerful actress without being a super model. She plays the black sheep of the family; a little lost. Nina finds a great deal of strength in her mother's mistake. Collette delicately avoids creating a cruel character who revels in the mistakes of her mother, instead choosing the wiser path of learning from her mother's mistakes. There is a great deal of infighting between Nina and her sister Constance. Their fights remind me of ones I have with my sister all the time. Mamie Gummer, who plays Anne's youthful best friend, is wonderful. Her character is stuck between her heart and her status in society. Even when she is crying and her heart is breaking, she is incredibly regal and charming. I can't wait to see her act in something else in the future. Vanessa Redgrave's performance is very hard for me to describe. Her talent at making her mental status ambiguous without being wacko or even especially tragic is why it is so powerful. The audience does not know if she is making up the story because she is slipping away or if these events truly happened. Physically and emotionally speaking, Redgrave is acting in a box. Not much physical space and limited emotional range might have been a stunner to a lesser actress but she makes the limitations work for her. I was constantly amazed. The movie is definitely woman-focused but the men in the movie are not just accessories. Patrick Wilson is mesmerizing as Harris. It is no wonder that everyone in the movie is in love with him, I sure was. Buddy Wittenborn is Lila's brother, spiraling out of control. Hugh Dancy spirals Buddy out of control without sending his acting down the drain. Glen Close has my favorite scene in the movie. It reminded me of the famous scene from Monster's Ball. It is terrible and jaw dropping grief. I was utterly stunned. The one acting disappointment was Natasha Richardson. While her fight scenes were memorable, most of her acting reeks of melodrama. It would have suited her to take an acting bath before we had to breathe her stink. It's a good thing she wasn't in charge of the visuals. The visuals of the movie are sparkling. Cinematographer Gyula Pados couldn't make a film richer in color, light so perfectly matched to mood and emotion. The visual concepts of the flash back sequences are powerful and resonating. There were many scenes that could have been stopped, printed, mounted and sold as art. I admit it, I cried. Evening is a powerful movie. Evening is defiantly a chick flick but a really great chick flick. If you want to impress a woman with a movie choice, pick Evening.

At least three writers (Washington Post, TimeOut New York, The New Yorker) have said this new movie would have worked better if made into a full-on melodrama by Douglas Sirk. This intermittent account of the death by cancer of an elderly lady named Ann Grant (Vanessa Redgrave), enlivened by lengthy and elaborate flashbacks to her medication-enriched memories of the early Fifties Newport wedding day of her upper class college friend Lila Wittenborn (Mamie Gummer; and Mamie's mother, Meryl Streep) is glamorized to the point of extinction by its cinematographer-director Lajos Koltai. (That Koltai should have gone from the spare, powerful Holocaust drama 'Fateless' to this confection is pretty tragic.) You'll never see such nice new England summer beach houses, so many scenes full of well-dressed people, or so many shiny late Forties convertibles with the tops down. But the scenes, which ought to have you weeping uncontrollably, just make you look at your watch and wonder where the payoff is, in the Fifties or in that house where Ann Grant is dying while her two squabbling and unlikely daughters, the proper Connie (Natasha Richardson) and the confused but honest Nina (Toni Colette), hang around downstairs.

The cast is so heavy-laden with divas (besides those mentioned, there are Clare Danes as the young Ann—an imperfect match; Glenn Close as Lila's stylish, patrician mamá; and Eileen Atkins as the night nurse) it renders the movie's conventional scenes unimportant and sinks its gossamer profundities. "At the end, so much of it turns out not to matter," Streep tells Colette, and us; "There is no such thing as a mistake." And then: "We are mysterious creatures, aren't we?" Is it enough reward for ten dollars, overpriced popcorn, and a wait of two hours to come up with nothing but that? True, though: much of the movie turns out not to matter—though there may well be such a thing as a mistake—and it's called 'Evening.' At the end it all adds up to the psychobabble truism that everybody did the best they could at the time. Which maybe wasn't very good; but the details are missing.

Ann comes in and out of consciousness muttering the name of Harris (Patrick Wilson), whom "everybody loved" but Nina and Connie have never heard of. And so the point of the story is . . .what became of Harris? No, not really. Nor is it what becomes of Nina and Connie, because they remain unformed or undefined; not Ann, because we learn little of what she did with her life, except that she had two girls and a couple of husbands she didn't love as much as Harris and gave up her career as a cabaret singer. Not what happened to Lila, who wanted to marry Harris but got hitched to somebody else (mainly no doubt because Harris was the housekeeper's son—though in the swirl of the glamour and the blur of the alternating time schemes these social distinction aren't well delineated). Lila just comes back at the end to cuddle with Ann in a Chanel-esquire suit and utter those little profundities. There are some embarrassing tricks with fake fireflies and moths that Vanessa has to take part in and Eileen Atkins has to dress up like a fairy godmother. As Rex Reed says, "it's amazing how good everyone looks in white linen." But still.

Of course, for acting fans there is bound to be material to enjoy here. Though they overwhelm the movie, it's fun just to see these people on the screen. Vanessa Redgrave is great, getting the most from her lines without seeming hammy. When Meryl Streep climbs into her deathbed with her, it's some kind of ultimate Hollywood Kodak moment. Toni Colette, who can be irritating and even ghoulish, is appealing as the neurotic but ever hopeful Nina. Cunningham's very post-Sirk beautiful loser character Buddy, the doomed, passionate, and blooming drunkard, a character central to the flashback action though barely mentioned in Susan Minot's book, gives the sexy and riveting Hugh Dancy (somebody we're surely going to see a lot more of) a chance to chew up the rug—which suggests Cunningham would really have some fun and give us something worth watching if he let go and just winged it without his own or anybody else's novel to have to slice and dice. People think Michael Cunningham is so good for movies (though some of us have yet to be convinced). Well then, why doesn't he do one, instead of redoing other things for other people to direct?. He adapted his own novel 'A Home at the End of the World;' David Hare adapted his 'The Hours;' this time he has adapted Susan Minot's novel. (Rumor has it she's not that happy with the result. Why should she be?) Isn't it time for Cunningham to write an original screenplay? Then we can see what he can do, and it better be good. And it better not be like this. Despite Todd Haynes' effort in 'Far from Heaven,' this is not an age in which the Sirkian sensibility makes sense. 'Evening' is a celebration of regret. In the era of George W. Bush that no longer seems like a viable emotion.