MOVIE REVIEW: 'Evening'


Movie review in the Friday, June 29 Oregonian ....




I'll say this for the dreary "Evening": It pulls one mildly interesting thematic switcheroo.

For a good long while, this adaptation of the Susan Minot novel unfolds like straight-up cheesy romantic melodrama. It starts out by panning down to a tableaux of young Ann Grant (Claire Danes). Ann is perched rather ridiculously on the side of a small sailing skiff at sunset, looking for all the world like she wandered in off the "Titanic" set.

This silly romance-novel image turns out to be the fever dream of old Ann Grant Lord (Vanessa Redgrave), a failed cabaret singer on her deathbed. She's haunted by morphine-induced memories of her "first mistake" -- an ill-fated 1950s weekend at an oceanside mansion, where her friend Lila (Mamie Gummer) was getting married to a blue-blooded twerp.

Redgrave-Ann mystifies her daughters (Toni Collette and Natasha Richardson) with cryptic phrases: "Where's Harris?" "Harris and I killed Buddy!" "I should have gone for that sail!"

Buddy (Hugh Dancy) is (was?) Lila's sweaty, drunken wannabe-writer brother. Harris (Patrick Wilson) is a doctor, Korean War vet and crush object of several people at the wedding.

Ann speaks of Harris as her great lost love, and it's here that the movie pulls its switcheroo, turning all this nostalgia on its ear: After all the romance-novel setup, what Harris really turns out to represent are all the unexplored roads in Ann's life, you see. He's not that important. Her fixation on him is ultimately revealed to be less of an exercise in one-true-love horse-dooky and more of a meditation on the melancholic courage of making mistakes and bold choices in life. Or, as Ann's cabaret pianist puts it, rather too on-the-nose, "Mistakes are beautiful, baby…. Mistakes are part of the fun."

This would probably be a much more affecting revelation if the movie wasn't so frequently lame.

Danes and Wilson give fine performances, but they're stuck in a film full of relentlessly weepy speechifying that all too often looks less like a drama and more like a Town & Country magazine spread.

The blue-blood wedding scenes are overpoweringly just-so: Everyone has names like "Pip" and "Peach" and poor Glenn Close, playing a family matriarch, is forced to deliver lines like, ""The people I have to seat are either mortal enemies, have had disastrous affairs, or both! Ha ha!" At the same time, it's kind of annoying that we're asked to root for Ann largely because she wears "unusual" bohemian clothes and talks about Greenwich Village. It’s all too precious.

Also, Dancy really overplays his drunken fool. Toni Collette's character's boyfriend (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) plays his entire role looking down at the floor. Scenes of tragedy are laughably staged. There's an endless pile-on of tearjerker, "actorly" speeches that reek of tearjerking self-indulgence. There's an embarrassing folksy-English cliché of a night nurse (Eileen Atkins) who occasionally appears to Ann in what amounts to a fairy godmother party dress. I hated that the 1950s radio plays Michael Bublé songs. And why oh why does every movie like this open with the exact same theme music – a tender orchestral dirge designed by Pavlovian-behavior specialists to elicit maximum melancholy?

The uneven filmmaking renders Minot's semi-powerful ideas impossibly trite. It gets so bad that one Oscar-winning special guest star eventually wanders in to tell us the moral, and that moral is, and I quote, "We are mysterious creatures, aren't we? And at the end, so much of it turns out not to matter." Ugh.
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C-minus; 113 minutes; rated PG-13 for some thematic elements, sexual material, a brief accident scene and language.

Treacly life (The Oregonian, June 29, 2007)

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Posted: Fri - June 29, 2007 at 01:42 PM        

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