There are some people in life you never get over. That much is clear in "Evening," an elegant, old-fashioned drama that's at times emotional and engaging and at times melodramatic and clumsy. Based on Susan Minot's novel and co-written by Minot herself and author Michael Cunningham, the film feels especially literary, trying to recreate characters and settings that would not have been out of place in an F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway novel.
"Evening" opens with the luminous Claire Danes lying on a sailboat drifting out to nowhere; her fingertips gliding softly through the crests of the waves as she passes. "Where's Harris?" she asks, suddenly. Flash forward to decades later, where a bed-ridden, gray-haired woman (Vanessa Redgrave) awakens swiftly and asks again: "Where's Harris?"
Danes and Redgrave are the same woman. Redgrave plays Ann in the present, a woman on the verge of death. As she drifts in and out of consciousness, she shares her ruminations on the mistakes she's made and the opportunities she squandered to the bewilderment of her two daughters (Toni Collette, Natasha Richardson.) As Ann increasingly loses lucidity, her thoughts fixate on Harris (Patrick Wilson), a man with whom she had a brief affair in the 1950s. For Ann, Harris represents a life -- and love -- she lost; a life that, under a different set of circumstances, could have created more possibilities, excitement and romance.
Danes plays Ann in the past, when she was a young, wide-eyed aspiring singer in love with the idea of love. Ann's friend Lila (Mamie Gummer) is getting married and has invited Ann to her family's stunningly picturesque New England manor for the wedding. Ann's arrival delights Lila's brother Buddy (a terrific Hugh Dancy), the family's reckless recluse (i.e. drunk) who loves others too much but himself too little.
The wedding is not the joyous occasion it should be. Lila is in love with Harris (a young doctor and also the son of her family's housekeeper), not her husband to be. But Lila's love is unrequited and she instead decides to marry because it is the thing that is expected of her, to the satisfaction of her mother (Glenn Close.) As Lila, Gummer gives a convincing performance simultaneously delicate and forceful. However, Harris quietly catches the attention of Ann, to which Buddy has an interestingly jealous reaction to.
Inevitably, a film with a structure like "Evening" -- with its two separate storylines -- one must be more engrossing than the other. In this case, it's the storyline in the 1950s with Danes, Gummer and Dancy. The three manage to create relationships rooted in some small version of reality. The same cannot be said for the unconvincing, short-lived romance between Ann and Harris. When Ann calls him "the most serious man she's ever met" she isn't kidding. Stricken with clichéd dialogue and an overall bland disposition, Wilson never makes the character of Harris interesting enough to make us believe Ann would fall in love with him (however handsome he might be.) That makes the fact that Ann -- years later, with precious few days left to live -- would be whispering his name all the more implausible.
The other storyline -- the one in the present with Redgrave, Collette and Richardson -- struggles to engage as much. The script tries to establish ideas of grief, mortality, motherhood and sibling rivalry, but a lack of screen time curtails those efforts. The present day section also struggles in tone. Scenes where Redgrave hallucinates her nurse (Eileen Atkins) in a shimmering, fairy godmother-esque gown have a sort of misplaced whimsy. Regardless, the quality of the acting prevails. Collette, in particular, is superb as the tense, confused and emotional daughter afraid of professional and romantic commitment.
The events of "Evening" unsurprisingly escalate to melodrama, particularly in the fate of a certain tragic character. Life, in this case, would have been much more interesting than death. But, as with Cunningham's similarly-themed depressing tale of womanhood, "The Hours," the film serves as a platform for some of the best actresses today to shine. And that list should now include Danes. In the opening credits, it is she who gets top billing, as she should. Her performance, conveyed through the pages of dialogue written across her facial expressions, anchors the film. She can sing, too.
But leave it to the great Meryl Streep to nearly walk off with the movie. In a superlative extended cameo, Streep (as the older Lila) visits Ann toward the end and the two recreate the rapport they had despite the decades apart. (In a bit of stunt casting, director Lajos Koltai employed real-life mother-and-daughter Streep and Gummer to play the same part.) Streep's scenes with Redgrave have a raw intensity that represent the heights "Evening" could have reached had it not been bogged by lazy storytelling and the occasional heavy-handed sentimentality.
Still, the excellent acting and several standout scenes make "Evening" worth seeing, especially in a season dominated by incessant sequels, superheroes and $100 million dollar budgets.
