A loooong morning with Evening

Remember when The Hours felt like days? The same author, Michael Cunningham, has his imprint on Evening, co-scripting with that book's author, Susan Minot. Apparently he's the go-to guy now for feminine perspective flicks with confused flashbacks about unfilled lives and tame sexual secrets.

Evening concerns a woman named Ann (Vanessa Redgrave, who's actually pretty good) on her deathbed deliriously reminiscing about WEEKEND THAT CHANGED HER LIFE, which isn't different from the SUMMER I'LL NEVER FORGET theme these movies often use.

Ann has the longest deathbed scene since Joe Gideon kicked the bucket in All That Jazz, and we don't even have Ben Vereen dancing here. Her daughters (Natasha Richardson, Toni Collette) hover, waiting for the inevitable and wondering what Mom is mumbling about. The flashbacks show us: Ann (now Claire Danes) attending the tony wedding of her friend Lila (Mamie Gummer) and falling for hunky Harris (Patrick Wilson, basically playing the father of the Prom King he played in Little Children).

Of course there's tragedy -- Cunningham is involved, after all -- that doesn't seem like much of a burden to carry for a half-century.

The most interesting aspect of Evening is its casting mother-daughter casting (Redgrave hatched Richardson and Gummer is Meryl Streep's offspring) But the fact that Gummer plays Glenn Close's daughter which looks just as genetically possible raises the question: Why don't you ever see Close and Streep in the same place at the same time? Or even in the same movie in which they're both cast, like here? Kind of Clark Kent, don't you think?

Evening eventually works best, not as an idyllic reverie or heartbreaking drama, but as an argument favoring euthanasia. Jack Kervorkian would've been a fine technical assistant. That way, Ann would fade away faster and the movie could end.

Comments

[Ryan Treacy]

I saw a preview for this before Spider-man 3 and once the text on the screen said, "from the writer of "The Hours" I was out. It doesn't look nearly as depressing though. Maybe if my girlfriend wants to see it, I'll get dragged along.