Designers will drool, but the problem is that Evening should have more going for it than Architectural Digest allure.
Evening (2007)
Tomatometer
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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
Koltai literalizes the symbolism and drowns everything in a sappy, overpowering score; the characters end up sounding like they're reading dialogue from a bad novel.
Easily the most insufferable film experience in a year that has already given us Wild Hogs, The Hills Have Eyes 2 and Premonition.
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.
This leaden adaptation, which was co-written by Minot and Michael Cunningham, is so full of forced melodrama and clunky literary devices that it becomes a chore just to sit through.
Even the film's obvious and shallow moments appear haunting, evocative and profound when filtered through this sunrise-to-sunset through-line.
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.
... so distanced from the emotions of the story that it never breathes on its own.
Screenwriters Susan Minot and fellow novelist Michael Cunningham make key changes to Minot's acclaimed 1997 book with mixed results; the alterations streamline the story and enrich subplots, but dilute its all-important central relationship.
It's the kind of female-centric syrup that isn't conceived creatively so much as it's calculated mathematically. But for a certain audience, it might be good enough.
Evening might be the most shocking waste of natural resources since the despoiling of the Amazon rain forest.
Vanessa Redgrave pursuing a poorly CGI-ed butterfly, with this incredibly idiotic look on her face, reminded me of a time I saw a retarded dog chasing a tree.
Boasting an ensemble of Hollywood's best actresses, this drama is unabashedly sentimental but still effective.
A dreary mood romance that flashes back and forth between present day and 50 years ago.
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.
As the cautionary tale of mothers and daughters it negligently aspires to be, Evening is strictly old news.
Director Lajos Koltai's generous application of luminous color tones over everything can't conceal his lack of control over narrative tone.
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