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Trailer for "Evening"

Is Buddy really queer? This question arises about two thirds of the way through Evening, adapted from Susan Minot’s 1998 novel of the same title. Since the movie’s central character, Ann Lord (played at older and younger ages by Vanessa Redgrave and Claire Danes), says early on, “Harris and I killed Buddy,” this possibility immediately becomes more intriguing. It temporarily sparks things up at a point when the movie is sorely in needs of a boost.

As it transpires, neither Ann’s “confession,” uttered as she lies mortally ill, nor the sudden interjection of Buddy’s identity crisis gives Evening enough of a spark to move it from its largely listless progress through a trans-generational story of constrictive class privilege and haunting regrets.

Much of the movie involves Ann’s feverish dreams and recollections, as she lies in her second-floor bedroom, of the fateful events a half-century earlier during the weekend of her college chum’s marriage at her rich family’s seaside estate. It was then that Ann met Harris (Patrick Wilson), the young physician who becomes an ambered symbol of youthful hope and passion, and of their loss. Everybody admired or loved Harris, including Buddy, although we’re eventually led to wonder how his love is to be defined.

But if Ann’s richly colored, lustrously photographed sleep reveries and memories are supposed to be about a pivotal couple of days of her life, Evening never really comes close to communicating a sense of life-altering importance. An even more important failure is the lack of a resonant emotional and narrative impact. The filmmakers seem to have aimed at conveying a message of intergenerational wisdom and hard-won consolations.

When, after nearly two hours, Evening finally stops moving back and forth between Ann’s house and deathbed and the weekend events a half-century earlier, there’s little consolation for the audience. The movie goes out with banalities and sighs.

For much of its length, the director, veteran cinematographer Lajos Koltai (he also directed Fateless several years ago), never comes to grips with his movie’s flattening, desultory spirit.

Part of the problem may lie with Minot’s novel. To judge (unfairly) by this movie, her characters and environment echo the tradition of 1930s, ’40s and ’50s novelists, like the greatly popular John Marquand, who wrote about the unrealized dreams and thwarted little insubordinations of wealthy northeastern Americans. Whatever merits Minot’s novel has, Michael Cunningham’s adaptation (he replaced Minot on this job) hasn’t done her or the movie much of a service.

Take young, troubled Buddy (a very competent Hugh Dancy). As Cunningham has conceded, Buddy hardly figures in the novel. The screenwriter must have been moved to try to impose a triangle like the one his own novel, A Home at the End of the World, on the material. It seems an afterthought here, and it doesn’t help that Harris never comes off as the compelling object of the characters’ affections he is supposed to be.

As the movie anemically proceeded, I began to impatiently anticipate the arrival of Meryl Streep (playing the older edition of Ann’s chum). When she finally appears for a skilled mini-performance, she’s made to deliver the message that must sum up much of Evening’s philosophy: Much of what engages and consumes us isn’t very important, finally. Now she tells us,