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Evening (2007)
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Reviews Counted:121
Fresh:33
Rotten:88
Average Rating:4.9/10
Consensus: Beautifully filmed, but decidedly dull, Evening is a collossal waste of a talented cast.
Rated: PG-13 [See Full Rating] for some thematic elements, sexual material, a brief accident scene and language
Runtime: 1 hr 57 mins
Genre: , Romance, Period Piece, Theatrical Release
Theatrical Release:Jun 29, 2007 Wide
Box Office: $12,406,646
Synopsis: Evening unites a stellar cast, and is based on the beloved novel by Susan Minot and adapted for the screen by Ms. Minot and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham (The Hours), under the... Evening unites a stellar cast, and is based on the beloved novel by Susan Minot and adapted for the screen by Ms. Minot and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham (The Hours), under the direction of Lajos Koltai (Fateless), who was previously an Academy Award-nominated cinematographer. Evening is a deeply emotional film that illuminates the timeless love which binds mother and daughter – seen through the prism of one mother’s life as it crests with optimism, navigates a turning point, and ebbs to its close. Two pairs of real-life mothers and daughters – Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson, and Meryl Streep and Mamie Gummer – portray, respectively, a mother and her daughter and the mother’s best friend at different stages in life. Overcome by the power of memory, Ann Lord (Ms. Redgrave) reveals a long-held secret to her concerned daughters; Constance (Ms. Richardson), a content wife and mother, and Nina (Toni Collette), a restless single woman. Both are bedside when Ann calls out for the man she loved more than any other. But who is this “Harris,” wonder her daughters, and what is he to our mother? While Constance and Nina try to take stock of Ann’s life and their own lives, their mother is tended to by a night nurse (Eileen Atkins) as she journeys in her mind back to a summer weekend some fifty years ago, when she was Ann Grant (Claire Danes)… ...a young woman who has come from New York City to be maid of honor at the high-society Newport wedding of her dearest friend from college, Lila Wittenborn (Ms. Gummer). The bride-to-be is jittery, and turns to her maid of honor rather than her own mother (Glenn Close) for support. Ann stays close to her friend, yet is even closer to Lila’s irrepressible brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy). Unexpected feelings surge forth once Ann meets wedding guest Harris Arden (Patrick Wilson), a lifelong friend and intimate of the Wittenborn family. Ann’s love for Harris will change her life, and those of her daughters, forever. -- © Focus Features [More]
Starring: Vanessa Redgrave, Claire Danes, Patrick Wilson, Toni Collette
Starring: Vanessa Redgrave, Claire Danes, Patrick Wilson, Toni Collette, Natasha Richardson, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Hugh Dancy, Mamie Gummer
Director: Lajos Koltai
Director: Lajos Koltai
Screenwriter: Michael Cunningham, Susan Minot
Producer: Jeff Sharp
Composer: Jan A.P. Kaczmarek
Studio: Focus Features
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Reviews for Evening
The film disintegrates into an indulgent succession of intense, fawning exchanges that overwhelm Minot’s thin and monotonous tale.
In its pursuit of superior craftsmanship and high-minded lyricism, Evening constantly risks sliding down the slippery slope into inept sentimentality and self-caricature.
The novel is too dense, too multilayered, too overpopulated to make a satisfactory film that is also faithful to the book.
This multi-generational chick flick may be blessed with a stellar cast but unfortunately errs on the pretentious side.
Evening is a terribly refined, painstakingly composed study in aristocratic angst that audiences will be hard-pressed to believe a word of.
Some big names have been assembled for this old-fashioned "woman's picture" about thwarted expectations and lifelong regrets.
Evening is melodrama with the brake lines slashed -- a curiously dreary installment of the "Who Has More Psychological Baggage!" game show where every character is a winner.
Evening, despite its fine source material and roster of formidable talent, lurches clumsily across two very long, disconnected hours, reducing Minot's, sprawling, ethereal story to a pop psych nugget about embracing life as it comes.
The tone, in turn, moves from arch to soapy to poignant. Yet it's the story that one can never quite get one's arms around.
Adapting from Susan Minot’s bestseller, Hungarian director Lajos Koltai’s (Fateless) pulls together a formidable cast – Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Toni Collette – but then leaves them to wade through a sickly stew.
Evening might be the most shocking waste of natural resources since the despoiling of the Amazon rain forest.
The film is a fine example of what works within the pages of a book doesn't necessarily work onscreen, particularly when the book in question is as dense as Minot's, and apparently as fragile.
Mostly Evening feels draggy and repetitive as it wallows self-consciously in its own sense of emotional and cultural significance.
Dull. It's hard to engage with the characters, the themes are underdeveloped and the tone is flat as the waters lapping the Wittenborn beach.
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