Such glamorous losers

At least three writers (Washington Post, TimeOut New York, The New Yorker) have said this new movie would have worked better if made into a full-on melodrama by Douglas Sirk. This intermittent account of the death by cancer of an elderly lady named Ann Grant (Vanessa Redgrave), enlivened by lengthy and elaborate flashbacks to her medication-enriched memories of the early Fifties Newport wedding day of her upper class college friend Lila Wittenborn (Mamie Gummer; and Mamie's mother, Meryl Streep) is glamorized to the point of extinction by its cinematographer-director Lajos Koltai. (That Koltai should have gone from the spare, powerful Holocaust drama Fateless to this confection is pretty tragic.) You'll never see such nice new England summer beach houses, so many scenes full of well-dressed people, or so many shiny late Forties convertibles with the tops down. But the scenes, which ought to have you weeping uncontrollably, just make you look at your watch and wonder where the payoff is, in the Fifties or in that house where Ann Grant is dying while her two squabbling and unlikely daughters, the proper Connie (Natasha Richardson) and the confused but honest Nina (Toni Colette), hang around downstairs.

The cast is so heavy-laden with divas (besides those mentioned, there are Clare Danes as the young Ann—an imperfect match; Glenn Close as Lila's stylish, patrician mamá; and Eileen Atkins as the night nurse) it renders the movie's conventional scenes unimportant and sinks its gossamer profundities. "At the end, so much of it turns out not to matter," Streep tells Colette, and us; "There is no such thing as a mistake." And then: "We are mysterious creatures, aren't we?" Is it enough reward for ten dollars, overpriced popcorn, and a wait of two hours to come up with nothing but that?

True, though: much of the movie turns out not to matter—though there may well be such a thing as a mistake—and it's called Evening.

At the end it all adds up to the psychobabble truism that everybody did the best they could at the time. Which maybe wasn't very good; but the details are missing.

Ann comes in and out of consciousness muttering the name of Harris (Patrick Wilson), whom "everybody loved" but Nina and Connie have never heard of. And so the point of the story is . . .what became of Harris? No, not really. Nor is it what becomes of Nina and Connie, because they remain unformed or undefined; not Ann, because we learn little of what she did with her life, except that she had two girls and a couple of husbands she didn't love as much as Harris and gave up her career as a cabaret singer. Not what happened to Lila, who wanted to marry Harris but got hitched to somebody else (mainly no doubt because Harris was the housekeeper's son—though in the swirl of the glamour and the blur of the alternating time schemes these social distinction aren't well delineated). Lila just comes back at the end to cuddle with Ann in a Chanel-esque suit and utter those little profundities. There are some embarrassing tricks with fake fireflies and moths that Vanessa has to take part in and Eileen Atkins has to dress up like a fairy godmother. As Rex Reed says, "it’s amazing how good everyone looks in white linen." But still.

Of course, for acting fans there is bound to be material to enjoy here. Though they overwhelm the movie, it's fun just to see these people on the screen. Vanessa Redgrave is great, getting the most from her lines without seeming hammy. When Meryl Streep climbs into her deathbed with her, it's some kind of ultimate Hollywood Kodak moment. Toni Colette, who can be irritating and even ghoulish, is appealing as the neurotic but ever hopeful Nina. Cunningham's very post-Sirk beautiful loser character Buddy, the doomed, passionate, and blooming drunkard, a character central to the flashback action though barely mentioned in Susan Minot's book, gives the sexy and riveting Hugh Dancy (somebody we're surely going to see a lot more of) a chance to chew up the rug—which suggests Cunningham would really have some fun and give us something worth watching if he let go and just winged it without his own or anybody else's novel to have to slice and dice. People think Michael Cunningham is so good for movies (though some of us have yet to be convinced). Well then, why doesn't he do one, instead of redoing other things for other people to direct?. He adapted his own novel A Home at the End of the World; David Hare adapted his The Hours; this time ha has adapted Susan Minot's novel. (Rumor has it she's not that happy with the result. Why should she be?) Isn't it time for Cunningham to write an original screenplay? Then we can see what he can do, and it better be good. And it better not be like this. Despite Todd Haynes' effort in Far from Heaven, this is not an age in which the Sirkian sensibility makes sense. Evening is a celebration of regret. In the era of George W. Bush that is no longer a viable emotion.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.