Lajos Koltai (2007)

In Evening, the elderly, dying Ann Grant recalls how, fifty years ago, she and a young man she was in love with caused the death of another young man, for whom Ann had a different kind of affection.  Ann was a bridesmaid at the wedding of Lila Wittenborn, her best friend from college.  At the Wittenborns’ huge, beautiful house and estate on Newport, Rhode Island, Ann finds herself increasingly drawn to a young doctor called Harris Arden and the feeling is mutual.  Harris, the son of the Wittenborns’ former housekeeper, is a friend-since-childhood of Lila and her brother Buddy, who behaves more and more erratically during the course of the marriage celebrations.  As night falls at the end of the wedding day, he continues to up the ante.  Ann and Harris both feel a sense of responsibility for Buddy.  They’ve only just recovered from the shock of fearing he’d drowned when they go off together into a secluded shack in the woods, leaving the drunken Buddy to wander into the path of an oncoming car.  He’s badly injured but still breathing when he’s found by some other wedding guests.  They call for Harris’s help but he’s making love with Ann in the sylvan hideaway.  The pair returns to the Wittenborn house next morning to learn of Buddy’s death.

An experience like that is certainly enough to prey on your conscience half a century later.   In a short story or novel about a character nearing the end of life and racked by the memory of a misdeed in the distant past, a good writer can make the guilt feelings powerful by showing how strongly they affect the person thinking back – without the ‘things ill done or done to others’ harm’ needing to be major crimes or misdemeanours.   In theory, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be possible for film-makers to do the same; in practice, they rarely do.  On screen, it seems that buried, nagging feelings of remorse need to be based on wrongdoings that are somehow spectacular.  That may render them more ‘cinematic’ but it also tends to make the psyche of the guilty party less interesting or extraordinary – it seems only right for them to feel they did something terrible because it was terrible, unequivocally so.  Evening is in fact based on a novel, by Susan Minot.  I don’t suggest that the past events have been gussied up in the process of screen adaptation.  I do think it’s unlikely that a film would have been made of the book if the grounds for Ann Grant’s septuagenarian guilt had been less floridly melodramatic.

Although The Hours (2002) is a very much better film, the resonances between it and Evening are several, especially in terms of personnel.  Michael Cunningham, who wrote the book The Hours, shares the screenplay credit for Evening with Susan Minot (and also executive produced).    Four of the cast – Eileen Atkins, Toni Collette, Claire Danes and Meryl Streep – also appeared in The Hours, in which the Clarissa Vaughan character is inspired by, and Virginia Woolf is in the throes of writing, Mrs Dalloway.   The Marleen Gorris film of the Woolf novel (in 1997) starred Vanessa Redgrave, who plays the elderly Ann Grant in Evening.   The Hours and Evening were published in the same year (1998) so Susan Minot can hardly be accused of plagiarising Cunningham but Evening recalls The Hours in the preponderance of its female characters, the atmosphere of regret and cultural ambitions (Ann wants to be a singer, Buddy a novelist), the bisexual flavouring, the spliced time structure.   But whereas each of the three stories in The Hours is absorbing in itself, as well as fortified by its relation to the other two, the halves of Evening feel insubstantial, individually and in combination.   Because Vanessa Redgrave is the dominant presence, the old woman seems the primary consciousness of the story but ‘the present’ of the film is thin.  As she drifts in and out of sleep, dreams and memories, Ann Grant has fragments of conversation with her nurse and with her two daughters, Constance and Nina, who keep telling each other home truths at greater length.  That’s about it in the present.  Much more time is devoted to the events of Ann’s youth – but the 1950s story is insufficient too, perhaps because it’s designed less as a drama with a life of its own than as a means of answering questions that the older Ann has put in our minds.

The direction by Lajos Koltai (who previously made Being Julia) is no great shakes.  The repeatedly windblown curtains at the windows behind Ann’s deathbed and a dream sequence in which Ann wanders out of bed to follow a butterfly (although Vanessa Redgrave in her white nightdress is a remarkable figure) are ‘poetical’ clichés.  There are some key moments that don’t work at all.   When Ann sings (‘Time After Time’) at Lila’s wedding reception, Koltai has Harris Arden get up from his seat and join her to dance on the podium:  you can’t believe in his impulsiveness and, when the music ends and the couple take a sheepish bow, you feel embarrassed for the actors more than the characters.  The morning-after scene, in which Ann and Harris return to the Wittenborn mansion, is very badly staged.   Lila has returned too, still in her honeymoon journey costume, yet her mother is hysterical with grief as if she’s just heard the news.  (How come Lila and her husband have made it back by this point?)  No one asks Ann and Harris where on earth they’ve been.

There’s another difference from The Hours, in which the cast appeared remarkably unaware of their combined talents.  Some of the actors in Evening seem to be feeling the weight of collective prestige, the sense of contributing to an important dramatic enterprise.   This is partly because of constraining family relations, both real and fictional.   Of course there’s a fascination in the casting of Mamie Gummer (Lila) as the young woman who will grow into the old lady played by Meryl Streep, and Natasha Richardson (Constance), as one of Ann’s daughters.  But the younger generation is up against it.  Mamie Gummer is a skilful, intelligent actress but she’s so much less vivid than Meryl Streep that, especially when Lila is dressed in a rather frumpish, dusty pink going away outfit, she somehow seems an older, faded version of her mother.  (Gummer may do better in more eccentric roles – she was good in Taking Woodstock.)   It’s affecting, because it’s so sad, to watch Natasha Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave together but, to be honest, Richardson’s playing is too careful:  she seems anxious to keep herself in the background.  Imagining that Claire Danes, who plays the young Ann, would grow into Redgrave requires some suspension of disbelief:  they may share a potential for recklessness but Redgrave’s imposing eccentricity is miles away from Danes’s core of cheerful sanity.  Danes sings charmingly and her acting is very good, particularly in her scenes with Mamie Gummer and Patrick Wilson (Harris), but she always seems vaguely uncomfortable – as if she doesn’t believe she could become Vanessa Redgrave either.

Toni Collette, sensational in her small, crucial role in The Hours, should be freer than the other younger actresses but the role of Nina, Ann’s ‘difficult’ daughter, is poorly conceived – there’s a crude contrast between her and the content, compliant Constance.  Although she registers strongly, some of the brittleness in her portrait of Nina feels like anxiety on Collette’s part.   As Mrs Brown, the night nurse, Eileen Atkins deserves sympathy for having to play some scenes dressed as the fairy godmother the confused mind of Ann imagines her to be – but no sympathy for the way she’s decided to do the part:  stage Irish, with a fey spark, and a look in her eyes that seems to want to tell you she may be playing a superficially humorous role but she’s a serious actress who understands there’s more to her character  than meets the eye (except that there isn’t).   Glenn Close, not for the first time, is a compelling but too obvious presence:  she’s an expressionist study of the soul of Lila and Buddy’s proudly controlling mother.   When she breaks down at the news of Buddy’s death, Close isn’t good at concealing that she’s been waiting the whole picture to do this bit.

Lila and Buddy’s father (Barry Bostwick) barely gets to speak.  It’s no surprise that Lila isn’t sure she wants to go through with marriage to a man called Clyde (who is such a cipher that the actor who plays him doesn’t appear even to get a credit on IMDB).  After the traumatic events of the wedding, Ann decides to marry a man called Ralph Haverford (David Furr) as an antidote to excitement.  Nina’s boyfriend Luc (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is no more than pleasant.   The only two sizeable male roles are Harris and Buddy and both seem just about unplayable because they’re literary hand-me-downs rather than characters.   The messed-up, dipso Buddy – the boy who can’t grow up or get to, let alone beyond, the first line of the novel he’s going to write – is a terrible idea and Hugh Dancy’s performance is a disaster.  Overeager from the start and overdoing febrile self-destructiveness very soon, he leaves himself nowhere else to go long before Buddy does.   ‘We all loved Harris,’ says the seventy-year-old Lila drily.  The ‘all’ seems to mean herself and Buddy and Ann, who also describes Harris, with succinct regret, as ‘my first mistake’.  The unreachable golden boy is a tired idea:  it’s greatly to Patrick Wilson’s credit that he makes a success of the role.  The reserve that Wilson gives to Harris is nuanced – he suggests guardedness and egotism, shyness and an almost scientific curiosity to see how others react.     When Ann and Harris, both now married to other people, meet by chance in a rainy New York street some years after their encounter at the wedding, you fear the worst – it seems such an obligatory scene for this kind of story.   There isn’t anything much in the writing to rescue the situation but Claire Danes and Patrick Wilson certainly do.  Wilson especially, and with the minimum of histrionics, shows you a man who’s going to be disappointed for the rest of his life and who finds the fact puzzling but unchallengeable.

In its closing stages Evening is an odd, unsatisfactory mixture of nihilism and facile uplift, concentrated in a conversation between Nina and the elderly Lila, who explains that, as you grow older, you get to realise how much doesn’t matter much.   It matters, though, and remains to Lila an unassailably good thing, that Ann sang at Lila’s wedding reception (even though when Harris joined her on stage it gave Lila a painful reminder that it was he, not the man she’d just married, whom she loved).   This disclosure seems to be enough for Nina to develop, on the spot, a positive outlook on life and towards the prospect of motherhood (she’s two months pregnant with Luc’s child).   The arrival of Meryl Streep as Lila senior gives the film, dying on its feet by this point, impressive artificial respiration.  Streep is such a conscientious impersonator that, as soon as Lila gets out of the taxi that’s brought her to Ann’s house, Sally said, ‘She’s doing an impression of her daughter’.  Sally had capitulated, though, by the time Lila was inside the house and meeting Constance and Nina, thanks to Streep’s amusing sizing up of the daughters.

The following sequence, in Ann’s bedroom, is much the best bit of Evening.  I’m not sure if Streep and Redgrave shared scenes in The House of the Spirits but I’d not seen them on screen together before so this encounter was bound to be an event – and it’s a happy event.  The scene isn’t that well conceived or directed.  It seems odd that, decades after they last met, Lila would curl up on Ann’s bed within two minutes of their reunion.  (This arrangement is designed to repeat the image of the two girls in bed on the morning of Lila’s wedding.)  But Meryl Streep’s acting is so good that it transforms the conception; and Vanessa Redgrave’s innate, passionate expansiveness is all the more impressive for being subdued here.  Streep takes Redgrave’s hand stiffly and, as she keeps holding on it, you sense the tension in Lila between resistance to, and loyal affection for, her old friend.  Mamie Gummer convinces you that the young bride is someone who can make the best of a bad job; her mother brilliantly conveys how deep-seated that propensity has become, and how tough it’s made the older Lila with the passage of time.

1 June 2010