Evening

[StickToPriest]

Posted: 6/17/07 at 4:25pm

Anybody heard any buzz on this film? I'm really looking forward to it and hope it lives up to my expectations. I mean what a cast...

Meryl Streep
Glenn Close
Natasha Richardson
Toni Collette
Vanessa Redgrave
Eileen Atkins
Claire Danes
Patrick Wilson
Hugh Dancy

[keen on kean]

Posted: 6/17/07 at 4:34pm

And Meryl Streep's daughter playing her mother's character at an earlier age.

Makes me feel kind of old. I think her name is Mamie Gummer.

[MotorTink]

Posted: 6/17/07 at 4:44pm

Check the Patrick Wilson love thread. Beacs is always posting new info!

[muscle23ftl]

Posted: 6/17/07 at 8:55pm

I saw the previews when I went to see "Georgia Rule"(that was great) and it looked amazing, also "A Mighty Heart" with Angelina Jolie looks very interesting.

I want to see both of the films.

[Glebb]

Posted: 6/17/07 at 8:57pm

That is a dream cast.

[muscle23ftl]

Posted: 6/17/07 at 8:59pm

They put Meryl's daughter among all those names on the promotions of the cast by the way, I wonder if anyone w/o contacts could ever make it to star in a film along those high profiled actors...

[beacon1]

Posted: 6/17/07 at 9:11pm

Wasn't Mamie cast first?

[keen on kean]

Posted: 6/17/07 at 9:21pm

I think it is a fairly significant role? That could account for the billing too.

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

Posted: 6/17/07 at 11:01pm

Mamie Gummer is actually regarded as a great actress, having won rave reviews and a Theatre World Award last season. Also notice how she very specifically stays away from using the last name Streep. Obviously she had the connections, but she sure has the talent to accompany it and that is why she got cast among this cast.
I'm sure people will be saying that about Gummer for a while though, it is inevitable, but just like Kate Hudson was able to become a star away from her mother's fame, I suspect Gummer will be highly regarded eventually without the obvious Streep connection.
I can't wait for this movie, it looked fantastic on the previews, and I love Michael Cunningham's work, his novel THE HOURS is one of my favorite.

[keen on kean]

Posted: 6/17/07 at 11:04pm

Gummer is, of course, her actual name.

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

Posted: 6/17/07 at 11:19pm

Right, Meryl Streep's husband is Don Gummer. What I meant to say was that she didn't use her mother's maiden name to her advantage or to find "contacts."

[muscle23ftl]

Posted: 6/18/07 at 7:10am

Kate Hudson, Gwyneth Paltrow and many other actresses didn't use the famous last name in the family. Out of the millions of girls in Hollywood trying to make it as an actress, these girls, have an advantage, even if they don't use a famous last name.

[RobbO]

Posted: 6/18/07 at 8:57am

wow.

[beacon1]

Posted: 6/18/07 at 10:23pm

This blogger really liked Evening:

http://www.spout.com/blogs/laraemeadows/archive/2007/06/18/11378.aspx

A wonderful chick flick

Evening (2007)

Evening is the beautiful story of the flawed love of a mother. The movie split in time, is magically shot, amazingly acted and has a touching script.

Vanessa Redgrave plays Anne Grant Lord, a woman sun-setting out of life. Lying in her bed, her mind remembering and misfiring, she recalls her first mistake. Claire Danes plays the young Anne, giving a youthful vitality to dying bed ridden woman. Daughters Nina (Toni Collette) and Constance (Natasha Richardson) try to decipher the real story from the disheartening dementia. Her first mistake revolves around Harris Arden (Patrick Wilson); the man her best friend Lila (Mamie Gummer) deeply loved. The daughters must come to terms with their mother’s past, and their futures.

The cast is glowing in Evening. The collective acting energy of this movie could have powered the equipment for the production of this entire film.

I am so glad to see Claire Danes working again, especially in this role. She is so young, and alive, fully living the joys, mistakes and heartbreak of young Anne’s first mistake. This is a true feat when you realize she is playing a woman, dying in bed. When her life overwhelms her, you can feel her desire to crack and her hopeless hope that she won’t. Some of her facial expressions grinded on me a little, but over all her performance was so radiant, I was left with that only as a side note.

Toni Collette continues to prove that you can be a powerful actress without being a super model. She plays the black sheep of the family; a little lost. Nina finds a great deal of strength in her mother’s mistake. Collette delicately avoids creating a cruel character who revels in the mistakes of her mother, instead choosing the wiser path of learning from her mother’s mistakes. There is a great deal of infighting between Nina and her sister Constance. Their fights remind me of ones I have with my sister all the time.

Mamie Gummer, who plays Anne’s youthful best friend, is wonderful. Her character is stuck between her heart and her status in society. Even when she is crying and her heart is breaking, she is incredibly regal and charming. I can’t wait to see her act in something else in the future.

Vanessa Redgrave’s performance is very hard for me to describe. Her talent at making her mental status ambiguous without being wacko or even especially tragic is why it is so powerful. The audience does not know if she is making up the story because she is slipping away or if these events truly happened. Physically and emotionally speaking, Redgrave is acting in a box. Not much physical space and limited emotional range might have been a stunner to a lesser actress but she makes the limitations work for her. I was constantly amazed.

The movie is definitely woman-focused but the men in the movie are not just accessories. Patrick Wilson is mesmerizing as Harris. It is no wonder that everyone in the movie is in love with him, I sure was. Buddy Wittenborn is Lila’s brother, spiraling out of control. Hugh Dancy spirals Buddy out of control without sending his acting down the drain.

Glen Close has my favorite scene in the movie. It reminded me of the famous scene from Monster’s Ball. It is terrible and jaw dropping grief. I was utterly stunned.

The one acting disappointment was Natasha Richardson. While her fight scenes were memorable, most of her acting reeks of melodrama. It would have suited her to take an acting bath before we had to breathe her stink. It’s a good thing she wasn’t in charge of the visuals.

The visuals of the movie are sparkling. Cinematographer Gyula Pados couldn’t make a film richer in color, light so perfectly matched to mood and emotion. The visual concepts of the flash back sequences are powerful and resonating. There were many scenes that could have been stopped, printed, mounted and sold as art.

I admit it, I cried. Evening is a powerful movie. Evening is defiantly a chick flick but a really great chick flick. If you want to impress a woman with a movie choice, pick Evening.

[jordangirl]

Posted: 6/18/07 at 10:58pm

SOOOOO excited to see this!! It looks amazing. (Though I do think the promos make it sound like it's Michael Cunningham's story when he was co-screenwriter with Susan Minot, the book's author.)

[Raviolisun]

Posted: 6/18/07 at 11:05pm

This looks amazing.

Mamie Gummer

Well, that going on the list of coolest names.

[tazber]

Posted: 6/18/07 at 11:14pm

I'm surprised with that cast it's so low profile. Seems like a fall movie. What's it doing released between Fantastic Four and Harry Potter?

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 6/18/07 at 11:15pm

The feel of the story is very summer-y.

I read the book (as I said in the other EVENING thread that no one cared about) and the film looks VERY different.

Very little of what happens in the trailer is in the novel.

[beacon1]

Posted: 6/21/07 at 8:15am

Another interesting blogger review of "Evening"
http://brainreserves.blogspot.com/2007/06/evening-conflict-regret-resolution.html

Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Evening: Conflict, Regret, Resolution, Peace

I have recently gone through losing my mother first to dementia and then to death. I of course felt that my experiences were unique. And probably universal, although knowing how exactly is a little difficult. The movie, Evening, proves that lots of other people have probably lived through similar situations. The fights between siblings (just too much tension builds up). The last gasp of incredible focus and energy that comes from saying good-bye. The memories that both warm and invade almost every moment. The tears. The regrets. The guilt. The love. The amazing ability of the mind to worry about mistakes and to grasp redemption and resolution and come to peace.

I was lucky enough to see an early preview of Evening at the beautiful, restored art deco theater, the Smith Rafael Center in San Rafael, California, also the home of the California Film Institute, sponsor of the Mill Valley Film Festival. The cast of this film is truly amazing: Vanessa Redgrave and her daughter, Natasha Richardson, Meryl Street and her daughter, Mamie Gummer; Glenn Close, Claire Danes, Eileen Atkins, Patrick Wilson, and Hugh Dancy. Just to see all these incredible actors in one film was a wonderful experience.

The director, Lajos Koltai (formerly a cinematographer of films such as Being Julia) and one of the writers, Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize winner for his novel, The Hours, were on hand for Q&A after the film. The film was inspired by Susan Minot's beloved novel.

Asked if the film is a "chick flick," both Cunningham and Koltai said, emphatically, "No!" I agree. It explores universal conflicts that come up between parents and children, between siblings, and between memories, yearnings, and a desire to feel that we've lived every moment to its fullest and made the best decisions that we could have made, that we loved well and lived well.

A lovely film. It will be coming out in theaters on June 29. Try to see it.

Updated On: 6/21/07 at 08:15 AM

[What Lola Wants]

Posted: 6/21/07 at 4:02pm

I definitely want to see this. That cast is amazing.

How is it different from the book? Should I read the book first?

[beacon1]

Posted: 6/21/07 at 8:25pm

Apparently it's quite different in some significant ways. Those over on the IMDB page who have read the book have cited some of the major differences.

It really is Michael Cunningham's version of the events in the book.

[beacon1]

Posted: 6/21/07 at 8:25pm

Here's Variety's Review (thanks to a poster over at IMDB)

A Focus Features release of a Hart Sharp Entertainment production, in association with Twins Financing. Produced by Jeffrey Sharp. Executive producers, Jill Footlick, Michael Hogan, Robert Kessel, Susan Minot, Michael Cunningham. Co-producers, Luke Parker Bowles, Claire Taylor, Nina Wolarsky. Directed by Lajos Koltai. Screenplay, Susan Minot, Michael Cunningham, based on the novel by Minot.

Ann Grant - Claire Danes
Nina Mars - Toni Collette
Ann Lord - Vanessa Redgrave
Harris Arden - Patrick Wilson
Buddy Wittenborn - Hugh Dancy
Constance
Haverford - Natasha Richardson
Lila Wittenborn - Mamie Gummer
The Night Nurse - Eileen Atkins
Lila Ross - Meryl Streep
Mrs. Wittenborn - Glenn Close
Luc - Ebon Moss-Bachrach
Mr. Wittenborn - Barry Bostwick

A woman's deathbed reveries provide a poignant but rather obvious counterpoint to her daughters' present-day emotional concerns in "Evening." As co-scripted by Michael Cunningham ("The Hours"), Susan Minot's adaptation of her own artfully fragmented novel arrives onscreen as another highly polished, star-studded meditation on mortality, regret and the unique drag of being a woman in any generation. Strong literary pedigree and powerhouse cast will appeal to sophisticated auds, and Focus Features' mid-summer launch reps a classic bit of counter-programming, but it remains to be seen if pic will get the year-end kudos and critical attention needed for sustained arthouse biz.
After making his directing debut in 2005 with the strikingly beautiful Holocaust drama "Fateless," Hungarian lenser-turned-helmer Lajos Koltai has sailed into decidedly tonier prestige-pic waters with his second feature -- adapted and exec produced by literary heavyweights Minot and Cunningham, and starring actresses such as Vanessa Redgrave, Glenn Close, Eileen Atkins and Meryl Streep, just for starters.

Redgrave plays aging Ann Lord, whose daughters Constance (Natasha Richardson) and Nina (Toni Collette) have gathered at her bedside in her final moments. When Ann mutters a cryptic sentence amid her feverish ramblings ("Harris and I killed Buddy"), pic takes a page from "The Bridges of Madison County," flashing back to a key moment in the 1950s -- as young Ann Grant (Claire Danes), an aspiring singer from New York, arrives on the coast of Rhode Island for the wedding of her friend Lila Wittenborn (Mamie Gummer).

While at the Wittenborns' summer cottage, Ann is entranced by the mild-mannered, powerfully attractive Dr. Harris Arden (Patrick Wilson). Latter exerts a similar pull on his longtime chums Lila -- lovely, insecure and about to marry a decent man she doesn't love -- and Lila's rascally brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy), an aspiring novelist who swings from jovial high spirits to depressive bouts of drunkenness.

As Ann supports Lila through her premarital jitters and explores her attraction to Harris, and Buddy is increasingly racked by boozy fits of self-loathing, the catalysts are in place for a tragedy that becomes the defining moment of Ann's life. Her innocence shattered, she falls into a series of ill-considered (and sparsely depicted) marriages and has two girls, while her singing career flounders.

To freight a single evening with such dramatic significance will rightly smack some viewers as a tad reductive. The more immediate problem with this ambitious, elliptical film is Koltai and editor Allyson C. Johnson's difficulty in establishing a narrative rhythm, as the back-and-forth shifts in time that seemed delicately free-associative on the page are rendered with considerably less grace onscreen. In ways reminiscent of Stephen Daldry's film of "The Hours," the telling connections between past and present feel calculated rather than authentically illuminating (though even with a key character's encroaching demise, "Evening" is overall a less lugubrious affair).

Pic intends to say something meaningful about the emotional legacy mothers bequeath to their daughters, most directly in the scenes between Constance, a happily married mother, and Nina, a restless, somewhat embittered single woman whose failed dancing career reflects her mother's own lost dreams. Though well-played by Richardson and especially Collette, the characters and their sisterly spats feel all too conveniently shaped to reinforce the film's multigenerational themes.

Still, individual moments are not without their felicitous touches -- mainly due to the cast, which is rich to the point of improbability. Though she looks nothing like a young Redgrave, Danes proves engagingly vivacious as the young, bohemian Ann, who's quietly disdained by Lila's socialite mother (Close, in a brief, indelible turn). Gummer's luminous, trembling Lila anchors the film's implicit critique of stiff, upper-class propriety, while Dancy makes a vivid impression in the problematic role of the self-destructive closet case. Atkins brings a no-nonsense warmth to the part of Ann's nurse.

Real-life mother-daughter thesping pairs abound: Redgrave (feeble and senile one minute, wide-awake lucid the next) and Richardson enact their relationship onscreen, and -- in a moment deployed as carefully as a secret weapon -- Streep, Gummer's mother, emerges late in the film for a rewarding extended cameo as the elder Lila.

Koltai brings a cinematographer's eye to the production, with lyrical images -- Redgrave's Ann reclining on a boat dock, or a bedroom suddenly teeming with shimmering moths -- that tend toward the surreal. Lensing by Gyula Pados ("Fateless") shows a studied contrast between the rich luster of the '50s material and the darker contempo footage. Other contributions, including the picturesque locations, production designer Caroline Hanania's meticulous period re-creations and Jan A.P. Kaczmarek's full-bodied score, are pristine.

Camera (Technicolor, Panavision widescreen), Gyula Pados; editor, Allyson C. Johnson; music, Jan A.P. Kaczmarek; music supervisor, Linda Cohen; production designer, Caroline Hanania; art director, Jordan Jacobs; set decorator, Catherine Davis; costume designers, Ann Roth, Michelle Matland; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS), Tom Williams; supervising sound editor, Dave Paterson; re-recording mixers, Reilly Steele, Paterson; visual effects supervisor, Aaron Weintraub; visual effects, Mr. X; stunt coordinators, Blaise Corrigan, George Aguilar; choreographer, Chris Michael Peterson; associate producer/assistant director, Tom Reilly; casting, Billy Hopkins, Suzanne Crowley, Kerry Barden. Reviewed at Clarity screening room, Beverly Hills, June 7, 2007. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 117 MIN.

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 6/21/07 at 10:42pm

WhatLolaWants: The book is just very different.


SPOLIERS



The adult Lila (Streep) doesn't even appear in the book.

In the novel, there are 3 daughters rather than just 2 (Collette, Richardson)

Buddy never jumps off the cliff in the movie.

Ann doesn't tell her daughters who Harris is...in fact, they never really find out.

And many more that I can't think of now.

[Glebb]

Posted: 6/22/07 at 9:28am

Need to see this and the Piaf film.
Vanessa, Meryl, Glen, Mamie, Toni and Dancy in one film. WOW!

[beacon1]

Posted: 6/22/07 at 12:56pm

Glebby!

And, don't forget the magnificent Patrick Wilson!