July 6, 2007

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 9

eveningsout

A top cast in a lovely film-but it's almost too precious

by Kaizaad Kotwal

They say that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if you examine your life and begin to doubt whether it was worth living?

That is the predicament at the heart of a new film from Hungarian director Lajos Koltai. Evening is a gem that asks the audience not only to examine their lives, ordinary or extraordinary as they may be, but also to find meaning in what they perceive as the failures or the ugliness.

Based on the best-selling novel by Susan Minot and adapted for the screen by Minot and Cincinnati-born, openly gay author Michael Cunningham, Evening is a precious film, sometimes a little too precocious for its own good. Nevertheless, with all the talent involved, this is a refreshing respite from summer blockbusters, most of them unimaginative threequels and fourquels.

Evening centers on the life of Ann Grant Lord (Vanessa Redgrave) who as a younger woman (played by Claire Danes) found her life completely changed during the wedding weekend of her friend Lila Wittenborn. The Wittenborns, a to-the-manor-born family in Newport, Rhode Island, live lives of exceptional comfort and elite elegance. But, due to the social conformity of the 1950s and the pressures of high society, the Wittenborns also live the lives that others expect them to, even if that means going completely against the grain of their own souls, their very beings.

As a young woman, Lila (Mamie Gummer) is about to marry Carl-a decent man and one who will make a great husband and father. But she knows that her true love has always been Harris (Patrick Wilson).

She's not the only one. Lila's brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy) is also in love with Harris but he knows that in his time and social strata, this is a love that truly dares not speak its name. So to hide his true feelings, Buddy tries to build a relationship with Ann who you guessed it is also in love with Harris. And Harris, who is the object of everyone's affection, has his eye on Ann alone.

All these tortured and hopelessly unrequited loves come to a head during Lila's wedding weekend, set against the idyllic beauty of the Wittenborn's seaside mansion.

The story is told in flashback as a dying Ann tries to make sense of her life to see if it was well lived. Her grown daughters Constance (Natasha Richardson) and Nina (Toni Collette) are there to say goodbye and are baffled by their mother's mumblings about people they have never heard of— Harris in particular.

If it isn't already apparent from reading the names above, Evening is a director and casting agent's wet dream. As though Redgrave, Danes, Wilson, Dancy, Richardson, and Collette weren't enough, Meryl Streep (the older Lila), Glen Close (Mrs. Wittenborn) and Eileen Atkins (Ann's deathbed nurse) round off this dream team of thespians.

No one disappoints in any way at all. It is a treat to watch Redgrave play the ailing matriarch and even though she spends most of the film in bed, she can still chew the scenery with her richly textured face, her profoundly telling eyes. When Streep arrives-old lady makeup and all—and shares an extended scene in bed with her old friend, it becomes a master class in the nuances and genius of acting.

Close takes her small role as the patrician matriarch and makes it memorable only as she can. From her wry humor to a stunning scene of utter emotional breakdown, she is an actor of primal instincts and she dazzles as usual.

Collette and Richardson (Redgrave's real-life and cinematic daughter here) play the emotionally tired and bickering sisters with depth and truth.

Atkins as the nurse brings her dignity and bravura to another small role, playing the gritty or fantasy scenes with a nuanced humor that adds unexpected layers to the tragedy in the film.

D

FOCUS FEATURES (2)

Vanessa Redgrave emotes from her deathbed during a visit with Meryl Streep in Evening,

Newcomer Mamie Gummer is a wonderful revelation. She has tried to build her career-mostly on stage-with anonymity, under the irrepressible acting shadow of cinema's Colossus, her mother Meryl Streep. But Gummer's game is up. She bears a striking resemblance to the offbeat and chameleonic beauty of her mother. And Gummer has nothing to worry about her performance is measured and skilled. It is a pleasure to know that Streep has managed to contribute even more to the world of acting and cinema with her legacy through Gummer.

Gummer's Lila is fragility and practicality all bundled into a young woman who knows that often life is not what we want it to be but rather what we have to do, despite our deepest desires, our most primal wants.

Danes as the center of the film creates a role that is charged with emotion and many conflicting facets. One of the best of her generation, she knows how to create roles that are complex and ones that reach gently for our unwavering empathy. In a scene where she tells Buddy to leave her alone and live his life openly and honestly as a gay man, Danes' brilliance leaps of the screen.

Dancy as the closeted Buddy, drowning his self-loathing and unrequited life-long love for Harris, is a revelation here. His almost porcelain beauty and physical fragility, coupled with his heartbreaking emotional devolution, creates the epitomal portrait of what it meant to be gay in the era of outwardly American perfection. Dancy plays the pain and the façade of trying to be "normal" with accuracy. In the hands of Cunningham's writing-a novelist and screenwriter who has created some of the most iconic queer films of the last ten yearsthe role of Buddy indicates a maturation in Hollywood's treatment of queer roles.

Patrick Wilson, who came to fame as the closeted Mormon in HBO's cinematic version of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, has made his ensuing career playing the role of the gorgeous American boy-next-door. Here, he gets to embody such a model of physical and iconic perfection. That Wilson is an actor of great depth and capability is never in doubt. He plays the perfect, almost boring boy of everyone's dreams with restraint and richness. Yet, the part of Harris is so bland that one wonders what everyone was lusting after, what everyone saw as the regret of never having gotten to spend the rest of their lives with him. Perhaps that is part of the lesson of the film: who we love has nothing to do with flashiness or flamboyance and why we love has nothing to do with what others see, but rather what

co-written by queer author Michael Cunningham.

we find dazzling and sparkling underneath the veneer of placidness, of even the mundane.

Wilson was also stunning as the perfect father and husband who has a torrid affair with his suburban neighbor in last year's under-appreciated Little Children. He is

MUSTARD SEED

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July 1 31, 2007

one of the best of his generation. Yet, if I may, a piece of career advice: He needs to abandon playing these handsome models of physical and stoic perfection. Wilson needs to break out and play the villain in a Continued on page 10

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