Ion Martea
posted 21 September 2007

Evening’s promotional campaign makes it an easy choice for movie goers. Any film that can claim to be ‘from the makers of The Hours’, and featuring Eileen Atkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, Natasha Richardson (Redgrave’s daughter), Toni Collette, Claire Danes and Mamie Gummer (Streep’s daughter), has its appeal secured, unless the viewer found Daldry’s film a boring, pointless venture, or simply have no special interest in or knowledge of great acting. As it turns out, this is a film that promises, but fails to deliver, despite the fact that everyone is working at their best.

Michael Cunningham (the Pulitzer winner for his novel The Hours) undertakes his first screenplay adaptation from an author other than himself. Teamed with Susan Minot (the author of Evening, the novel), Cunningham proves that he is indeed a remarkably gifted writer, but he also signals his limitations. The story revolves around the youth of Ann Grant (played by Danes and Redgrave at different ages), and is told with the same flair for time manipulation and emotional minimalism so characteristic of Cunningham.

Ann is a woman who had a rich life (full of happiness, regrets, momentary joys and irreversible mistakes), most of which happened in her youth. Now, on the deathbed, she remembers and laments for her greatest passion, a boy named Harris (Patrick Wilson), who filled one day of her life, one evening that would haunt her forever. Harris is an old friend of the Wittenborn siblings: Buddy (Hugh Dancy), who is dating Ann, and Lila (Gummer), who has given up trying and is getting married to a man worthy of her class in the early 1950s. The wedding day is the centre of Ann’s memories, for it was in that night that her life stumbled upon truth, and her feelings and actions found unison in happiness.

Evening is sentimental and its makers are aware of that. Arguably, one cannot work sensibly with feelings unless one accepts their essences, even if some have become clichéd or outmoded. Hungarian cinematographer turned director Lajos Koltai has thus constructed a work that explores the power of sentiment using a varied visual palette with cinematographer Gyula Pados, a lyrical (verging on unbearable) score by Jan AP Kaczmarek, and the simplicity of dialogue delivered by Minot and Cunningham. The problem is that the actors are given such a rich stage that their performances become redundant. Irrespective of how subtle Redgrave is in her delivery of past love through hiding regret, she is buried in the density of colour and mood driven not by her acting, but by the supporting music. The dogma that less is more is so closely adhered to in the performances, it is ironic that Koltai ignored the principle when judging the effect of photography, music and the screenplay itself.

However, the failure of the film does not lie completely in the misjudged balance between the different cinematic components. Rather, the failure comes primarily from a lack of emphasis on its strengths. Standing back from technique, one has to ask, what is the film made for? What is its inner message? We should not fall back onto the original novel by Minot, but find in the film itself the driving element of the structure.

The first reaction is to say that this is a work exploring the relationship between happiness and regret, which arrives at the conclusion of the older Lila Wittenborn (Streep): ‘Your mother had her whole life. She sang at my wedding... she raised two girls... we can't know everything she did. We are mysterious creatures, aren't we?’. Mysterious, therefore, refers to creatures unaware that regret is not an antonym for happiness. But is this really the case, when Ann Grant is never really shown to make existential mistakes? She has done what she wanted at every step in the film, thus making her lethargic nostalgia trivial. Evening makes the same mistake as Titanic (1997) in its adulation of loss (of a loved one) through choice, suggesting in consequence a conflict, rather than an engagement, between happiness and regret.

Given the final desire of the film to reconcile the fact that life is not to be regretted, as its fullness is an expression of our existence through it, Evening loses its focus through concentrating on the wrong characters. It is a mistake similar from Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby, in which Fitzgerald’s masterstroke of shadowing his hero with a rather unremarkable Nick Carraway was thrown in the bin. More regrettable is that Koltai forgot to look into James Ivory’s 1987 adaptation of Maurice, given the major similarities between the focus of the latter, Clive Durham (played by Hugh Grant), and what should have been the real focus of Evening, Buddy Wittenborn.

Ivory was good at circling the plot around Maurice, yet he never lost the opportunity to signal that it is Clive who holds the whole story together. Buddy is similar, in the way that he helps all the main characters understand themselves through his vision of life, which he sadly failed to undertake himself. He is the one who showed that happiness is life itself, with its inconsistent cycle of disappointments and failures. A great director would have seen the potential in this, especially when the character in question is played so exceptionally by an actor who not only acted the part, but embodied it completely. Hugh Dancy achieves unthinkable by putting the entire A-list cast of the film in the shade, with his honest, heartfelt performance, resembling Lew Ayres’s Ned in Holiday (1938). Koltai must have thought of Harris and Ann too much when filming Evening, leaving his discovery hidden in the dark of the evening.