Even as I admired most of the performances -- and I do stress most of them -- I found myself searching in vain for one character to care about.
Evening (2007)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:29
Fresh:8
Rotten:21
Average Rating:4.8/10
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
Evening's visual period splendour, its vivid characterizations and their comfortably clichéd relationships somehow draw us in and make us care.
Evening achieves a kind of wisdom, though it's a strange and bitter wisdom. The film arrives at a pessimistic and almost nihilistic view of life as something not very important -- and then invites us to take strength and comfort in the notion.
This weeping ladydrama -- this cinematic doily, this chintz wing chair from a P-town antique boutique -- takes us to the oxymoronic world of WASP emotion.
Things are happening too fast to be convincing, and the romance -- rather, the one-night stand -- between Ann and Harris hardly seems worth a lifetime of regret, or two hours of your time.
Everything about Evening seems engineered to liquefy moviegoers, specifically middle-age female moviegoers who miss their mothers. This would include me: I was a sloppy mess by the end.
It courts its audience with a warm story about lost loves and paths not chosen, and it boasts an array of strong performances from its top-notch ensemble.
There are few things more depressing than a weeper that doesn't make you weep. Evening creeps through its dolorous paces as prudently as an undertaker.
It took me a while to warm to these people and their self-consciously idyllic settings -- as well as to the slick direction of former cinematographer Lajos Koltai -- but I was eventually won over.
Not even a firm approach can rescue Evening from the enveloping thematic finery. It's a hopelessly classy piece of china.
Designers will drool, but the problem is that Evening should have more going for it than Architectural Digest allure.
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.
Evening might be the most shocking waste of natural resources since the despoiling of the Amazon rain forest.
Boasting an ensemble of Hollywood's best actresses, this drama is unabashedly sentimental but still effective.
A collection of Lifetime-channel clichés arranged with the metallic precision of a machine.
If you've not read Susan Minot's 1998 bestseller Evening, you will be happily oblivious to the movie's glaring departures and free to settle into this languid, gorgeously shot film, which bears only a passing resemblance to the novel.
Director Lajos Koltai's generous application of luminous color tones over everything can't conceal his lack of control over narrative tone.
Evening is a terribly refined, painstakingly composed study in aristocratic angst that audiences will be hard-pressed to believe a word of.
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