Evening.

"This is one of the rare movies that are too sensitive for their own good," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "In the course of it, in both the past and the present, all the characters have to spill their feelings about everyone else, and the pileup of hurt, rue, and guilt—confessions and reconciliations and partings—becomes oppressive. The structure that the filmmakers have created is too complicated and fussy for their fairly simple story and what it has to say about time and memory, and some of [director Lajos] Koltai's directorial touches... turn poetry into kitsch."

"People here don't just talk too much; they say, 'There's something I have to tell you' first," warns David Edelstein in New York. "Evening only bestirs itself when Meryl Streep in old-lady makeup pays [Vanessa] Redgrave a visit: The way these two great actresses breathe the same air and adjust their rhythms to each other seems almost holy."

In the New York Times, Celia McGee talks with Michael Cunningham and Susan Minot - separately - about his adaptation of her novel and with producer Jeff Sharp about why Cunningham was brought on.

For New York, Sara Cardace talks with Mamie Gummer, Streep's daughter about, gulp, playing the same character at a younger age.

Earlier: Ed Gonzalez at Slant and Brandon Harris.

Update, 6/26: Paul Cullum profiles Gummer for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 6/27: Paul Cullum has a long profile of Koltai in the Los Angeles Times.

"Remembering is a novel's business, and notoriously difficult to translate to the screen," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "Only Raoul Ruiz's dazzlingly free adaptation of Proust's Time Regained (whose frame of a dying man trying to unscramble his memories Minot lifted more or less wholesale) has come close to replicating the creative role of recall—sparked by fear, desire, and regret—in giving shape and significance to the experiential jumble that we call the past.... Stripped of the rhythmic lilt of Minot's prose and her delicate probe into the treacheries that time and memory work on our lives, Evening tips over into farce."

Updates, 6/28: "[I]n its pursuit of superior craftsmanship and high-minded lyricism, Evening constantly risks sliding down the slippery slope into inept sentimentality and self-caricature," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "With a high-wattage female ensemble cast, dreamboat Rhode Island locations and a respected European director, Evening feels like one of those devil's-candy productions that aim to bring artistry to a large audience, specifically a large audience of adult women who don't often go to the movies. Even considering it in that light, I found it miscalculated and overcooked, although Claire Danes's glowing, gawky, oddly appealing performance... should announce her arrival as a major star."

At the Reeler, Michelle Orange finds that Evening "suffers from the same problem as a certain ex-boyfriend of mine: All emotion registers as melodrama, though in this case the flushed and flustered parts do not cohere into a melodramatic (i.e. generic) whole."

"Here's the thing: no matter what I write, a lot of you, and you know who you are, are going to see this movie," acknowledges Marcy Dermansky. "Not see Evening? It's like having to say no to a Jane Austen adaptation.... The over-the-top sentimental story, however, will wear you down, ruin any pleasure derived from watching luminous Danes and illustrious others - all those famous people acting their hearts out in such enviable surroundings."

Updates, 6/29: "At first, second and final glance, Susan Minot's Evening, a claustrophobic 1998 novel about a woman in her 60s remembering the days and few torrid nights of her life while slowly, very slowly dying, doesn't seem as if it would translate easily to the big screen," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "It hasn't. Stuffed with actors of variable talent, burdened with false, labored dialogue and distinguished by a florid visual style better suited to fairy tales and greeting cards, this miscalculation underlines what can happen when certain literary works meet the bottom line of the movies. It also proves that not every book deserves its own film."

"An impressive pedigree doesn't always guarantee a felicitous outcome, as any number of Hapsburgs or Hiltons will confirm," agrees Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"[I]t's hard to think of a more miserable movie in recent months," sighs Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

Bilge Ebiri's experience is quite different: "Evening starts off as something of a bust and winds up tearing you apart. I may be mixed on it, but I can't wait to see it again."

"[T]he film arrives at a pessimistic and almost nihilistic view of life as something not very important - and then invites us to take strength and comfort in the notion," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's not what you'd expect, and it's certainly not the typical message. It might be most interesting thing about the picture."

Updates, 7/1: A "schmaltzy nostalgic fusion of clichéd melodrama and carpe-diem lessons about regret, love and courage," sighs Nick Schager at Cinematical.

"The uneven filmmaking renders Minot's semi-powerful ideas impossibly trite," writes Mike Russell. "It gets so bad that one Oscar-winning special guest star eventually wanders in to tell us the moral, and that moral is, and I quote, 'We are mysterious creatures, aren't we? And at the end, so much of it turns out not to matter.' Ugh."

Update, 7/5: Jennifer Merin talks with Koltai for the New York Press.

Posted by dwhudson at June 25, 2007 7:16 AM