Starring: Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Vanessa Redgrave, Claire Danes, Toni Collette, Patrick Wilson
Director: Lajos Koltai
Scheduled release: Now showing

Evening is a confluence of prestigious names. It is based on a novel by Susan Minot, and adapted by Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours. The movie’s cast is Dream Team calibre, from Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, and Vanessa Redgrave to Claire Danes and Toni Collette. And it marks Lajos Koltai’s anticipated second film.

Who? OK, so the director isn’t exactly a household name, but the filmmaker’s fingerprints are all over this moving story of a dying woman, confined to her bed, who reflects on and regrets a relationship she let slip away. Evening studies the choices in life that lead us to settle: marriage, jobs, children. It is a movie about hasty (and often bad) decisions in which Ann (Redgrave), nearing her end, wishes she had taken a chance with Harris (Patrick Wilson), a demure and handsome stranger she met at the wedding of her best friend, Lila (Mamie Gummer).

Koltai, a long-time cinematographer, directs Evening with a keen eye for contrasting visual tones: Ann’s deathbed scenes are muted, fading, and dreary. Her daughters, played with worried concern by Toni Collette and Natasha Richardson, wear bland colours, argue in harsh whispers, and keep their energy levels subdued. Koltai’s flashback scenes, however, are the lifeblood of the picture, a pristine reflection of a Norman Rockwell painting, with pure white mansions perched on impossibly sandy cliffs overlooking a deep-blue ocean. Did it really look that good or is that just how Ann, played in youth by a starchy Claire Danes, remembers it?

The transitions between the past and future aren’t always graceful and we come to care more for the flashbacks, the scenes that detail the history shared by these characters in which the promise of a murder heightens the dramatic tension. But Evening features Acting with a capital A, pulled off by serious thespians putting years of training to the test. It signifies, I believe, the first time on film that a real-life mother-daughter team (Gummer and Streep) play the same character at different stages of her life. And while Wilson wouldn’t be my first choice to play a supposedly magnetic and inspiring male protagonist, the rest of Evening is spot on.

Sean O’Connell