Evening, He Said

I've always hated the segregation of films into guy films and chick flix's. When you term a film like "Field of Dreams" as a man's film, you deny women the chance to see how men can feel about their relationship with their fathers. This would be true of the film "Evening", if men chose not to see it because some critic or the marketing department shortcut their responsibilities and hung the Gal film label on the it.

It is true that the main theme of this film is the relationship between mothers and their daughters and I for one can't learn enough about this subject, as every women I know and care about has a mother and these relationships fairly teem with nuances and issues I have no clue about.

In addition to the need to understand more about the subject, men would deny themselves the opportunity to see some fine performances by some of our finest actresses. The unique situation here is the film features two mother daughter teams. Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson play a mother and daughter. Meyrl Streep and Mamie Gummer play one character at different ages.

In this magnificent use of the flashback technique Michael Cunningham and Susan Minot, who wrote the novel the script is based on, combine to write a script that allows us to go back in time and return to present day seamlessly and intelligently to understand how things of the past affect the way we are today.

In this story, two daughters are trying to make sense of their lives and their relationship as their mother lays dying in the room above them. The mothers dreams and ravings, assisted by the painkilling drugs she is getting to make her comfortable, are suggesting to her daughters a part of her life that they are unaware.

We see the past through the dreams of the mother, played by Vanessa Redgrave. Her younger self, Ann, played wonderfully by Claire Danes, is the off beat New York friend of socialite, Lila, played by Mamie Gummer. Ann has traveled to Rhode Island to be the maid of honor in Lila's wedding. Lila's brother, played by Hugh Dancy, is eager to stop his sister's marriage to the family's approved spouse in favor the their friend Harris. Harris is the son of an old housekeeper, who has become a part of the family.

Harris has returned for the wedding from his medical practice in a small town where he serves a mainly poor clientele. it is obvious that he is welcome, but he would not be if he were to try and elevate himself above his status in the eyes of Lila and Buddy Wttenborn's Parents, played by Glenn Close and Barry Bostwick. In the story of the past Harris's relationship with Lila, Buddy and Ann hold the key to the mystery of why Ann is reliving this time in her life as she prepares to die.

In the present her daughter Nina, played by Toni Collette, is unsure of her future. she has been bounding from one career to another and duplicating that pattern in her love life for years. At this point however there is a unanticipated defining moment in her life occurring. she is pregnant with the child of a man who truly loves her and wants to marry her. She is afraid of making a mistake, which is why she has lived her whole life in a series of failures to commitment.

Her sister Constance, played by Natasha Richardson is the 'good daughter", who has the career, the husband and kids. her success hides and equally frustrating suspicion that somehow by committing she's missed something.

What we learn in the end is that by committing we do pass up opportunities and we will never know what might have been and we can't help but wonder but grieving over lost opportunities that might have been is a wast of time. This is brought home in a scene where Lila , played at this age by Meyrl Streep, comes to spend one last visit with the dying Ann. Reminiscent of an earlier scene where they lay together in Lila's bed on the the morning of her wedding a discussed her commitment to her marriage that day, this time they talked about Harris and what he meant to both of them and how their lives turned out because both of them turned down the chance to build a future with him when in truth they both wanted to do that and turned their back on the chance.

In the end, that scene summed it up for us, but one more scene between Nina and the older Lila summed it up for the girls. In the end, it's not the life we could have had that counts, it's what we do with the life we got.