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EVENING
Directed by: Lajos Koltai.
Produced by: Jeffrey Sharp.
Written by: Michael Cunningham & Susan Minot, based on the novel by Minot.
Director of Photography: Gyula Pados.
Edited by: Allyson C. Johnson.
Music by: Jan A.P. Kaczmarek.
Released by: Focus Features.
Country of Origin: USA. 117 min. Rated PG-13.
With: Claire Danes, Hugh Dancy, Patrick Wilson, Mamie Gummer, Toni Collette, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Eileen Atkins, Glenn Close, Ebon Moss-Bachrach & Meryl Streep.

Evening is the classy chick flick alternative to the summer action sequels that should please fans of The Notebook. However, with its star power and gorgeous cinematography, it’s prettier to look at than to think about too deeply.

Ann (Vanessa Redgrave) is dying. Like a Rosebud-type mystery, her pain and morphine-induced mutterings intrigue her hovering daughters Connie (Natasha Richardson, Redgrave’s real-life daughter) and Nina (Toni Collette) as she calls out, “Harris was my first mistake,” and “Harris and I killed Buddy.” Smoothly drifting from today to Ann’s flashbacks and dreams, the film mostly focuses on overlapping romantic triangles in 1954 Newport at the nuptials of a reluctant bride, Mamie Gummer as Lila.

Twenty-four-year-old Ann (Claire Danes) seems to have graduated from the same rebellious college classes in Mona Lisa Smile. Wearing a bohemian peasant blouse and sandals from Greenwich Village, she’s awkward with Lila’s straight-laced parents and the other New England bridesmaids, who have nicknames like Peach. The night before the nuptials, the bride’s brother, Buddy (Hugh Dancy), pleads with Ann to change his sister’s mind. He’s convinced that his sister really loves another man, Harris.

Adapter Michael Cunningham substantially changes Buddy from Susan Minot’s book, gratuitously adding conflicts for him from a character from his novel A Home at the End of the World. But as the only non-bland male and fervently vulnerable in a stiff upper lip world, Dancy is winsomely adorable in his moist-eyed overwrought drunkenness.

Patrick Wilson’s oblique Dr. Harris Arden is treated like his “prom king” in Little Children. This cipher of a character doesn’t support his being the class-conscious housekeeper’s son and a Korean War veteran. Audiences will doubtlessly titter at his seductive reference to the textbook Gray’s Anatomy as the soap opera comparisons to the TV show are irresistible. An unconvincing later scene tries to make him seem less of a hound dog, yet Lila, now older, unceremoniously dismisses his life: “Harris was just a boy…We were all in love with him.” She continues, “He worked for the poor. He became an old man…At the end, so much of it doesn’t matter.”

But these homilies are given depth because the older Lila now is played by Meryl Streep, Gummer’s real-life mother. It is a grand scene when Streep theatrically makes her entrance, pausing for applause. Ann literally rises from the almost dead to greet her old friend. The strikingly similar Streep and Gummer convey the passing of time that cosmetics cannot and add resonance beyond the script, emphasizing the mother/daughter themes that otherwise take too long to surface. With so much screen time spent on the hyped suspense and tragedy around the wedding, Ann’s quizzical life choices with vague husbands and her daughters’ neglected childhoods are given a rushed tour.

The daughters’ lives schematically represent two sides of their mother – Nina, with red-streaked hair, is a dancer torn between love and independence, and the luminous Connie is the fulfilled wife and mother. Their differences come to the fore in a sharply naturalistic argument that cuts to the bone of stressed children at the bedside of a dying parent.

What we are left with is a legacy of lowered expectations from the 1950’s as Danes finally sweetly sings a traditional lullaby to her little girls while their dinner overcooks on the stove. Like the spaghetti, Ann will also have to neglect her struggling singing career for her children. In doing so, the film highlights women’s nurturing power over other fulfillments, with mothers resigned to breaking their children’s hearts whatever they do. We’re a long way from An Unmarried Woman and My Brilliant Career, baby.

But one can ignore the maudlin mother to daughter advice and just revel in the atmospheric images and sounds. Director Lajos Koltai was a noted cinematographer for decades before his beautiful debut film Fateless, and his work here with Gyula Pados is exquisite, even if all of those breathtaking Newport sunrises and sunsets with a signature sailboat are special effects.

Even before the opening credits, the sound design of waves and wind evocatively recalls a line from the book “The shore was never silent.” Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne’s “Time After Time” is a weak choice for the centerpiece period song, though, and the score swells too predictably, but the violin and piano solos and vocalizations complement the sentimental mood. Nora Lee Mandel
June 29, 2007