evening: mushy chick flick
Evening
(PG-13; 117 minutes)
As ill, elderly Ann Grant Lord lies in her deathbed, her mind takes her back 50 years, to an eventful summer and a romance that she never forgot. Downstairs, her two grown daughters wonder what their dear mother is thinking about, while flashbacks to the ’50s explain it to the audience.
Have a lovely “Evening” — if you’re a chick-flick fanatic.
Written by Susan Minot (who wrote the novel it’s based on) and Michael Cunningham (”The Hours”), directed by Hungarian cinematographer Lajos Koltai, this feminine tear-jerker stars Vanessa Redgrave as the fading Ann and Claire Danes as the her youthful incarnation. Toni Collette and Natasha Richardson (Redgrave’s real-life daughter) play the worried daughters, and Tampa’s own Patrick Wilson appears in the flashbacks as the man who captivated Ann so many years ago.
Glenn Close and Meryl Streep add even more thespian power — although they have brief roles in different time frames and don’t appear together on screen.
Although the film looks lovely and the cast members are all outstanding, “Evening” comes off as a hanky-soaking trifle. It teaches us that even the well-off have emotions and heartbreak, but that’s scant comfort when sitting through the painful conversations and class-conscious confrontations.
The ’50s sequences are artfully presented — the scenery is as delicately designed as the fine performances — but the story is essentially very high-toned soap opera.
Mothers and daughters are this film’s most likely audience. Because we are neither, we found it a bit mushy and we give it a C+.
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