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Long day's journey

What could have been The Hours becomes interminable
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
September 26th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
I could've glanced all night. Patrick Wilson and Claire Danes in the uneven Evening. Their Gap ad is better.
Evening

Directed by Lajos Koltai
With Claire Danes, Toni Collette, Vanessa Redgrave, Patrick Wilson, Hugh Dancy, Natasha Richardson, Mamie Gummer, Eileen Atkins, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close

Lajos Koltai’s Evening started life as a Hollywood prestige picture then somehow metamorphosed into a Showtime programmer. Based on Susan Minot’s acclaimed novel of the same title, it features a veritable who’s who of serious film actresses: Claire Danes, Toni Collette, Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Natasha Richardson and Eileen Atkins. The screenplay was created by both the novel’s author and Michael Cunningham, the famed author of The Hours.
Interestingly, the film version of Cunningham’s complex novel shares four of Evening’s actresses — Streep, Danes, Collette and Atkins. Unfortunately, this is all to Evening’s detriment, as it is impossible not to judgmentally pit the two films against each other.
If The Hours was an epic journey into three different eras and three women’s lives, Evening is a plodding back and forth between two eras, with the occasional lay-by in one character’s drug-induced dream state. Having not read Minot’s novel, it’s difficult to know where her writing ends and where Cunningham’s begins — though, being a fan of the latter, I have to hope that the line “I still remember what stars are ours” is Minot’s.
Evening may not be chick lit, but it’s become a chick flick, with its ensemble of divas giving it their best shot at being mothers and daughters sharing and caring for each other. If only we could care.
The film begins with the aged Ann Grant (Redgrave) on her deathbed, watched over by her two daughters, Nina (Collette) and Constance (Richardson — Redgrave’s daughter in life). In her semi-conscious state, Ann mumbles some names that mean nothing to her daughters: Buddy and Harris. These names will serve as our keys to that old oaken door marked “Memory.”
Cut to an Eisenhower-ish day, where a young Ann (Danes) arrives in Newport, Rhode Island, for the wedding of her best friend, Lila (Mamie Gummer). Ann is a Greenwich Village bohemian who sings jazz in the Village’s dumps and dives. Lila, on the other hand, is the daughter of a wealthy family and, therefore, groomed early on for a wealthy groom. But Lila’s heart belongs to another: Harris (Patrick Wilson).
Everyone loves the broodingly handsome Harris, a young doctor from a few class rungs down, including Lila’s brother, Buddy (Hugh Dancy). However, the aged Ann mysteriously mentions to her brood on their deathwatch that she and Harris killed Buddy. The film then becomes a foraging around for clues to the truth behind Ann's final ramblings.
The plot thins as we discover that the “killing of Buddy” is more metaphorical than actual. Young Ann and Harris will fall for each other right under the eyes of the sensually anguished brother and sister, which leads us to the film’s greatest problem. Although continually invited to, we don’t like Ann.
Buddy’s passion for Harris is, for him, sublimated by his professed love for his friend Ann. While Buddy and Ann appear the best of chums (at one point she confesses to Harris that she “loves him,” though more as one sibling toward another), Ann will cruelly spurn Buddy’s drunken proposal of marriage, and will later grossly assault him and berate him in front of their intellectual inferiors: the smart, young Newport circle gathered for Lila’s marriage. Her motivation for these actions is never clear, nor is there anything resembling remorse during old Ann’s pre-morgue slab ruminations.
It doesn’t help that Dancy’s Buddy is such a carefully constructed performance, while Dane’s is another of this actress’ lazy dips into her bag of tics. There are other problems as well. However handsome Wilson is, his Harris just doesn’t seem to possess the magnetism to so effectively ruin lives.
The rest of the performances run the gamut. Close, as Lila’s mother, adds the proper dash of class to this outing until Koltai (and the scriptwriters) hand her a stale scene of ham that all but trumpets “for the Academy’s consideration.” Redgrave is off with the pixies, as she has been for the past two decades, with her patented dreamy-regalness, while Atkins, arguably the greatest actress in Britain, pops in as an Irish night nurse.
Given little, Streep (as the older Lila), Collette and Richardson manage much with their roles as Ann’s props. But there’s finally little to applaud.
Koltai’s eye for period detail (much in evidence in his underrated Being Julia) is second to none, and there are a number of beautifully composed scenes. Yet, if The Hours seemed to fly by, this Evening never seems to end.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (26/09/2007):

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