An all-star cast of the greatest actresses of our time - including Academy Award winner Vanessa Redgrave, Academy Award winner Meryl Streep, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Natasha Richardson and Glenn Close - come together in this passionate and heartwarming story. As Ann (Redgrave) reflects on one beautiful and life-changing weekend with the one true love of her life, her daughters (Collette and Richardson) come to their own understanding about the power of the past and the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters, family, and the loves of their lives. A star-studded cast brings richness and texture to
Evening, a lyrical tale of regret, unrequited love, and hope, written by novelists Susan Minot (
Rapture) and Michael Cunningham (
The Hours), based on Minot's book. Ann (Vanessa Redgrave) lies ill, deliriously remembering when she came t! o the summer home of her best friend Lila to be Lila's maid of honor (her younger self is played by Claire Danes). But the young Ann is soon caught between the hungry need of Lila's brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy) and the magnetic outsider Harris (Patrick Wilson). Meanwhile, the elderly Ann is watched by her two daughters, Nina (Toni Collette) and Constance (Natasha Richardson), who wrestle with unresolved feelings towards their mother, their choices in life, and each other.
Evening starts off feeling a bit stiff and literary, but gradually finds its rhythm. While the emotional peaks and precious images feel inflated and hollow, the little ephemeral moments--the heartbreaks, yearnings, disappointments, and comforts, the flash of a smile or the widening of an eye--glimmer with warmth and honesty. It's rare that such restraint can be so compelling and so rewarding;
Evening is well worth watching for the accumulating emotional power of these small moments. Also featur! ing Glenn Close and Meryl Streep.
--Bret Fetzer Beyond Evening 
Evening the novel by Susan Minot | 
Vanessa Redgrave Essential DVDs | 
More DVDs with Claire Danes |
Stills from Evening (click for larger image) With two novels and one short story collection published to overwhelming critical acclaim ("
Monkeys takes your breath away," said Anne Tyler; "heartbreaking, exhilarating," raved the
New York! Times Book Review), Susan Minot has emerged as one of the! most gi fted writers in America, praised for her ability to strike at powerful emotional truths in language that is sensual and commanding, mesmerizing in its vitality and intelligence. Now, with Evening, she gives us her most ambitious novel, a work of surpassing beauty. During a summer weekend on the coast of Maine, at the wedding of her best friend, Ann Grant fell in love. She was twenty-five. Forty years later--after three marriages and five children--Ann Lord finds herself in the dim claustrophobia of illness, careening between lucidity and delirium and only vaguely conscious of the friends and family parading by her bedside, when the memory of that weekend returns to her with the clarity and intensity of a fever-dream.
Evening unfolds in the rushlight of that memory, as Ann relives those three vivid days on the New England coast, with motorboats buzzing and bands playing in the night, and the devastating tragedy that followed a spectacular wedding. Here, in the surge of! hope and possibility that coursed through her at twenty-five--in a singular time of complete surrender--Ann discovers the highest point of her life. Superbly written and miraculously uplifting,
Evening is a stirring exploration of time and memory, of love's transcendence and of its failure to transcend--a rich testament to the depths of grief and passion, and a stunning achievement.As Ann Lord lies on her deathbed, her daughter delivers a balsam pillow from the attic. At first the ailing woman is confused, but suddenly the scent reminds her of the "wild tumult" she experienced 40 years earlier:
Something stole into her as she walked in the dark, a dream she'd had long ago. The air was so black she was unable to see her arms, it was a warm summer night. Above her she could make out the dark line of the tops of spruce trees and a sky lit with stars. She felt the warm tar through the soles of her shoes. The boy beside her took her hand. In the porous world between conscious and unconscious ! the prot agonist of Evening revisits the great passions of her life, along with its considerable disappointments. The boy in the dark remains the fixed point--not so much because he is the most important man in her life, but because of the untapped possibilities he represents. Meanwhile, friends and relations come to sit by Ann Lord's side as she veers between clarity and feverish recollection. In her third novel, Susan Minot takes some new risks--her narrative spanning seven decades of memory and her style ranging from Stegneresque particularity to the exquisite abstraction Virginia Woolf perfected in To the Lighthouse. Equal parts memory and desire, fiction and poetry, Evening is a seductive story made more so by the measured pace of details emerging, one by one, like stars. --Cristina Del Sestorelaxed straight leg
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