‘Evening’

This is the kind of tiresome story where people are forever saying just what they are thinking and feeling.

By: Elise Nakhnikian

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Meryl Streep (left) and Vanessa Redgrave are among the acting legends who appear in Evening.


   "You seem to be the love of my life," says a hangdog man who’s trying to salvage his relationship with a skittish girlfriend in Evening. It’s the kind of thing people almost never say in life and almost constantly in this paint-by-numbers chick flick, a deadening waste of star power crammed fuller of exposition than a freshman English class.
   Based on a novel of the same name by Susan Minot, who co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Cunningham (The Hours), the story flip-flops between two time periods.
   In the present, Ann Lord (Vanessa Redgrave) lies picturesquely dying. In attendance are her two daughters, Connie (Natasha Richardson) and Nina (Toni Collette), the commitment-phobe with the persistent boyfriend. Nina, whose raspberry-colored hair falls over one huge eye, looks like Leela of Futurama. Of course, Leela’s a cartoon character, but that’s less of a barrier than you might think.
   But Nina’s impasse with her boyfriend and the cold war she’s waging with her sister soon become pretty tedious. Of marginally more interest is the buried past that has just begun to obsess Ann, becoming more real to her than the present. Stoned on morphine, she rants about people her daughters have never met or even heard of, until the movie obligingly supplies another flashback and we learn more about who they were and what they meant to Ann.
   In the glowing past of the flashbacks, the luminous young Ann (Claire Danes) spends a highlight-heavy weekend at the country house of her good friend Lila Wittenborn (Mamie Gummer). Lila, whose stoic WASP reticence winds up looking practically saintly next to everyone else’s acting out, is getting married (Ann is one of the bridesmaids), which may explain why so many people are getting smashed. But the wedding doesn’t account for the rest of the drama.
   Soon after arriving, Ann learns about the real love of Lila’s life: not her near-faceless husband-to-be, the poor sap, but the chiseled, Eisenhower-era-handsome Harris (Patrick Wilson), the son of the Wittenborns’ housekeeper. Meanwhile, she falls for Harris herself, rather heartlessly having a fling with him immediately after hearing her friend’s tearful confession.
   Lila’s operatically desperate brother, Buddy (Hugh Dancy), one of those too-sensitive souls who periodically pop up in movies, chugging champagne with all the joie de vivre of Madame Butterfly after her sailor has jumped ship, confesses his adoration of both Ann and Harris and then self-destructs as they pair up. But Lila’s wedding, Ann’s highly romantic one-night stand, and Buddy’s death are just three of the stops as we lurch through this rickety rollercoaster ride, every peak of joy followed by a headlong plunge into melodramatic despair. The happy moments are tinged by melancholy even as they unfold, thanks to the dying-woman structure that encloses them.
   The camera angles are clunky too, with too many uncomfortably close close-ups leaving us staring into Redgrave’s aristocratic nostrils. The symbolism is tedious, weighed down with shots of stars and fireflies and butterflies and with Eileen Atkins’ aphorism-spouting night nurse, who sometimes appears to Ann in a sparkly white Angel of Death dress. And there’s lots of talk about mistakes — apparently just so we can be told at the end, by a transcendent Ann, that "there’s no such thing as a mistake."
   Every time you turn around, another great actor is making an entrance — Redgrave, Danes, Collette, Richardson, Atkins, Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, for God’s sake — but most are constrained by the straitjacket script. The ’50s costumes and makeup wind up wearing Close, who’s reduced to not much more than a slash of bright red lipstick across a too-tight mouth. We’re not even granted any vicarious enjoyment to speak of from the gorgeous scenery in and around the Wittenborns’ "country mansion," as Buddy unnecessarily labels it.
   So we’re reduced to admiring Streep and her daughter, Gummer, and Redgrave and her daughter, Richardson, as they artfully play opposite one another — or, in the case of Gummer and Streep, play one another. It is marvelous how like one another both pairs are, Gummer with her mother’s soulful understatement and that same way of pursing her lips and swallowing just a little to express doubt, and Richardson with Redgrave’s distinctive mix of earthy intensity and ethereal elegance.
   But even these gifted actresses are not enough to salvage an evening spent at Evening. A parade of pronouncements with almost no sense of humor, this is the kind of tiresome story where people are forever saying just what they are thinking and feeling. As Lila would no doubt think, though she’d be too polite to say it: What a colossal bore!
Rated PG-13 for some thematic elements, sexual material, a brief accident scene and language.