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'Evening' (12)


 
***

DVD Release

As Ann lays dying, she remembers the wedding weekend of her best friend, Lila, and the passionate love affair she experienced with another wedding guest, Harris.

So, maybe I’m just a massive cynic when it comes to all this lovey stuff, but the main premise of this story is that two people, after only spending one weekend together in their entire lives, believe the other to be their soul mate. I’m sorry, I know this is fiction, but the fact that Ann is still pining over this one man years and years after is a little obsessive, but maybe it is not the man she longs for, but the time when she was happiest and had the whole world at her feet. The younger Ann (played by Claire Danes) is to be the bridesmaid to Lila (Mamie Gummer), whose little brother, Buddy (Hugh Dancy) she is also best friends with. At the wedding, Harris (Patrick Wilson) makes an appearance and everything spirals out of control, and the lives of the four young people are changed forever. In the present day, Ann (Vanessa Redgrave) shifts between delirium and the real world, her mind mainly focussed on the wedding weekend fifty years before. Helpless, her two daughters (Toni Colette and Natasha Richardson) look on, whilst battling their own guilt. The lives of the two daughters are certainly the most boring aspect of the film and their fighting seems so clichéd it doesn’t pack the emotional punch it is clearly meant to. There are some interesting moments wherein the older Ann imagines she is talking to the ‘Night Nurse’ about her life, but the main point of interest is clearly based on the wedding and the film flags when it is not in that setting.

There is certainly a plethora of stars in the cast (Glenn Close and Meryl Streep also make an appearance) but the whole film is just painfully average. There is no ‘great love’ story to mark it out from other films of the genre, although there is a great deal of tragedy. All the characters seem a little one-dimensional, and the love affair between Ann and Harris is pretty stagey. It romps along at a fairly good pace, however, and the whole film looks beautiful – it is certainly not a ‘bad’ film, just quite average.

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