Evening
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Movie Reviews of Evening
Movie Review: Beautiful, wonderful movie
Summary: 5 Stars
this movie is a great film. It's beautiful, funny, wise, touching, moving and deeply personal and true to life. It has everything a good movie SHOULD have: good actresses, great script, great sets and great music. It's about a dying woman who recalls her life when she was young. She remembers one weekend she spent being her best friend's bridesmaid at a wedding held in New Port. She was a young woman, played by the beautiful Claire Danes. She was a singer, who sang for drunks and tourists as she said. She had a best friend, Buddy and she met a nice and handsome boy named Harris. Ann Grant is the main character. Ann falls for him, but Harris and Ann both face drama when Buddy gets killed by a moving car. Ann blames herself for the accident, but it was really Buddy who caused it. He was a drunk, and a spoiled rich kid who needed help. He kissed men, horrfied his parents and was lazy. He drank too much. The wedding goes okay, but the bride wonders if she should have really married Harris or not. Ann marries the groomsmen, has two little girls named Connie and Nia and becomes a lounge singer and sings in clubs and bars. In flashbacks, much Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, it shows how hard it was for Ann to raise two two little kids and have a career at the same time. One scene, towards the end of the movie, shows Ann singing to her two daughters who watch her when the food is burning. She truly loved them. Then Ann is old again, on her deathbed while her two grown up daughters played by Natsha Richardson and my favorite actress Toni Collette lie by her side. Both girls fight over who is more fulfilled. Connie grew up to be a mother and had kids. Nina is a single cool chick who is pregant and hasn't told her boyfriend Luc yet. She is worried about her mistake. It's takes Meryl Streep's character who tells her that we are mysterious creatures, but it the end so much of it turns out not to matter. Connie and Nina see things a different way, they fight and are at each other's throats like a lot of sisters are but there is also a great amount of love and warmth and tenderness that a lot of sisters have. They have a great sisterly realionship. I believed when I first saw them together. Natasha is great as the older, more respsoible sister. Toni is stunning and amazing as a the younger, more rebellious one. Toni Collette is the best actress in the whole movie. She's beautiful, moving and funny and cool and sarcastic. Her one liners are moving and cool. "Darling, can be please do this some time when my mother isn't dying?" she tells her boyfriend. When her sister remarks on an evening that their mother took them to see Peggy Lee sing, Nina snaps, "No. It wasn't. She was just sad because she was sitting near two little girls in party dresses watching someone else sing." I love the fights between the two. It reminds me of me and my sister. We fight too, like cats and dogs. But then again what loving sisters don't? Meryl Streep has a small role as Vanessa Redgrave's best friend now old, but she is talented and an amazing actress with two Oscars and more on the way. Claire Danes is beautiful and talented. Hugh Dancy as drunk Buddy is stellar. The screenplay by Michael Cunningham was delicious and well-written. It was written by a master. I love that all these talented actresses were in one film. Glenn Close is amazing. Watch one scene where buddy dies and she cries and screams. She looks very real and her pain is real. She is a true star. I love this wonderful movie and can't enough good things about it. I love Toni Collette, she's one of my favorite actresses and I really look up to her and admire her. She's a good actress, she's beautiful and talented and smart and a cool person. I love watching her movies. I loved "Little Miss Sunshine" and "In Her Shoes." But this one film is her best. Top-notch acting, moving story and beautiful score. This movie really made me cry and laugh and it will do the same to you!Movie Review: Evening
Summary: 5 Stars
I have never been influenced by mixed reviews not to buy an item. Being a fan of most of the cast in this film and Mr Dancy in particular I knew that none of the actors would have signed on this project if they had not been intrigued by it. I read Susan Minots book a while ago and knew what to expect. She also worked on the script for the film together with Michael Cunningham. It is fair to say that not all the characters in the book appear in the film, some like Buddy Wittenborn who is scarcely mentioned in the novel has been promoted and given a main role to explain his personality better.
Evening is about the recollection of an elderly and dying woman about one weekend spent in Newport when she was young at her best friend's wedding and the events that happened then and changed her life. How she met Harris, a young doctor with whom she would have a passionate affair, witnessed the anxiety of her best friend and bride to be Lila who was about to marry a man that was not her first choice but did not have the guts to call the wedding off, the spiralling out of control of her former college mate Buddy, brother of Lila, a tormented soul with bi-sexual tendencies and the tragic accident that ended his life far too early. The woman is Ann Grant who married a couple of times and has brought up four childen (in the book) of which two daughters have made it into the film adaptation. It's very moving to see real life mothers and daughters Meryl Streep (as elderly Lila) and Mamie Gummer (as bride to be Lila) and Vanessa Redgrave (elder Ann) and Natasha Richardson (one of Ann's daughter's in a film together. Sadly only Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson have a nice scene together. Ann's two daughters don't have an easy relationship with each other which unravels while they stay at their mum's side during her last weeks.
Evening is not a film to watch if one wants just to relax but an emotional ride on many levels. The individual characters are well defined and the acting of the cast is superb. Add to this the richness of the cinematography and experience and depth of director Lajos Koltaj (who's work I admire too) and you have a wonderful ensemble piece that does not seek to please but is very rewarding if you are willing to travel with the characters through their journey.
Movie Review: "We Were All In Love With Harris"
Summary: 5 Stars
Based on the Susan Minot's novel by the same name with a screenplay written by her and Michael Cunningham (THE HOURS) and starring Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave and Glenn Close, three of the best living actresses, EVENING would have to be worth seeing and indeed it is. Ann (Vanessa Regrave), bedridden, terminally ill and in and out of dementia, mumbles the word "Harris," a name unknown to both her grown daughters Constance (Natasha Richardson, Redgrave's own daughter) and Nina (Toni Collette). The audience soon learns, as the plot jumps back and forth between the present and the 1950's, that Harris (played by the young Kevin Costner look-alike Patrick Wilson) is someone that everybody was in love with, including the young Ann (Claire Danes) and her best friend Lila (Mamie Gummer), although both women married other men. Ann's daughters do not find out Harris' identity until late in the film.
Although the film is sentimental and predictable, it is saved by acting of the highest order. The friend I saw the movie with was blown away, in her words, by Redgrave's performance; but I, as always, was besotted by Ms. Streep who only appears near the end of the film in a very small role as the elder Lila-- she describes herself as an "old lady"-- but is, as always, perfect. (Watch her, for instance, as he descends the stairs with the caution that only an older person has.) Of course it is not difficult to see her as Lila in old age since her own daughter who bears an eerie resemblance to her of course plays the younger Lila. Glenn Close as the stylish matron and mother of Lila is wonderful. Buddy (Hugh Dancy) as Close's troubled and often inebriated son is good as well.
The film is about missed opportunities (see Ian McEwan's treatment of a similar theme in his latest novel ON CHESIL BEACH), first loves, settling for less, but at the end of life-- the elder Lila says that she has been both extremely happy and very unhappy-- it all seems to even out, at least in EVENING.
This is one of those movies that I liked much more the day after seeing it and upon recollection, a good sign that it indeed is a fine film.
Movie Review: Evening
Summary: 5 Stars
Evening
Forget about the charge of "mediocrity" that one reviewer leveled against this movie; it lives up to the high praise of the most positive reviewers.
I purchased this DVD on something of a whim, and after the first viewing, I was afraid I had made a mistake. I wasn't sure I wanted to keep in my permanent collection a movie that seemed to center on a dying lady. But my second viewing of the film totally changed my appreciation of it. It *is* a fully uplifting and beautifully crafted, thoughtful film. Almost every character is crafted as a complex individual, and even though loose ends are not fully tied together, this film has more life reality to it than most films. My advice to would-be viewers is to view the film once, check out the deleted scenes and the extremely helpful "making the movie" section, and then view the film again. If a person is not fully enchanted by the film by then, they have missed something essential about life. No, this film is an edifying paean for living the life one has made without looking backwards. As the ailing Ann (Vanessa Redgrave) hears from the night nurse and from Lila, "there is no such thing as mistakes in life," and, as we learn from the "making the movie" section, the drama of the curtains blowing into the bedroom at the end symbolizes how liberating acceptance of this reality can be. Mr. Sartre, you got it all wrong in "No Exit!"
Movie Review: Breathtaking views and Breathtaking performances
Summary: 5 Stars
Saw this Saturday night at the Provincetown Film Festival, and it's a stick-to-your-bones movie -- it's really stayed with me. Adapted very smartly from what is probably an excellent novel, it's a back-and-forth-in-time drama with fully rounded characters, thoughtful rumination on life choices, and, I'm not exaggerating. one of the greatest casts ever assembled in 100+ years of movie-making. Wonderful work from everyone, led by a luminous Vanessa Redgrave as a dying, deluded Newport matron, and Claire Danes as her much younger self. Meryl Streep's daughter Mamie Gummer is, like Mama, the real deal; Patrick Wilson looks like Paul Newman circa 1958 and doesn't overplay the charm; and what a pleasure to see such excellent stage actors as Barry Bostwick and Eileen Atkins contributing sharp, detailed cameos. Hugh Dancy, also from the stage, doesn't bring much edge to the somewhat clichéd role of an unhappy rich wastrel, and the family issues are resolved perhaps more neatly than real life would allow. But it's a deliberately paced, visually gorgeous meditation on real life issues, and you can cry at it and not feel like you're being recklessly manipulated. Also, what a sumptuous parade of 1940s/50s automobiles.