Evening

Grade: D

Also known as that time of day when people take an Ambien and go to sleep.

A woman on her death bed reminisces about the weekend in her life that changed everything – her best friend’s wedding – while her annoying daughters wonder if her memories are real or morphine-induced. Through flashback and flash forward, screenwriter Michael Cunningham rehashes the technique he used in “The Hours,” this time to much, much lesser effect.

There is nothing more depressing than watching actors you admire greatly give uninteresting performances portraying uninteresting characters living uninteresting lives. Vanessa Redgrave lies in bed and gets teary-eyed muttering names like “Harris” and “Buddy” that her daughters have never heard of before. Natasha Richardson is the mother hen daughter who is so dull and wooden she’s barely believable as Redgrave’s daughter (yes, they are mother and daughter in real life.) Toni Collete is the brooding child, unsure of her current relationship and hoping her mother’s life experience will hold some clues to tell her what to do. Yawn. Eileen Atkins is reduced to playing a night nurse and Redgrave’s fantasy angel. Enough said.

Flash backward. Claire Danes is the younger version of Redgrave, a bohemian singer in desperate need of Marni Nixon (is there anything more irritating than crowds looking on adoringly at someone who can barely carry a tune?) Mamie Gummer (apparently Meryl Streep’s daughter, a factoid I was clued into when I whispered to my partner, “They did a good casting job, she looks just like a young Meryl.” Okay, so I’m an idiot) is the panicked but indomitable bride-to-be, committed to marry the man she can have because the man she loves isn’t all that interested. Hugh Dancy (Vanessa’s aforementioned Buddy) is the brother of Mamie and close friend of Claire’s (are you getting all this?) He gets drunk and very weepy. His sexuality is in question. All three seem to be infatuated with Patrick Wilson (Harris), child of the family housekeeper who rose above his status to become a doctor (this will be quite important, since he won’t be there when someone he loves needs him the most, and regret is a critical motif throughout.) As always, Wilson is gorgeous to look at but has virtually no screen presence, so everyone’s adoration of him seems questionable. Glenn Close is mother of the bride. She is also one of my favorite actors of all time. She is quite dreadful here. Overly made up, puffing on cigarettes like Norma Desmond and overacting a storm with facial expressions designed to hit the last row of Radio City.

And then Meryl Streep (Mamie later in life) arrives to visit a bedridden Vanessa Redgrave. We prepare for fireworks and revelations. We are given tedium. Literally nothing of interest happens between them. Meryl gets back in a cab and goes home.

Brothers get drunk and deliver touching but inappropriate toasts to the bride. Kids being kids take off all their clothes and jump off cliffs into the watery depths below – someone will not survive to the end of the movie. Former lovers meet on a street by accident years into the future, Barbra Streisand musses with Robert Redford’s hair and he takes a protest flyer from her. “See ya, Katie.” Only this time Patrick Wilson remembers the heavenly stars he named for Claire Danes, it’s raining and not outside the Plaza Hotel.

Nothing is quite impressed enough with itself to be truly pretentious, nothing emotional enough to be genuinely melodramatic. It’s all just a total flatline.

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More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0765447/