VIEW FILM STILLS: Evening READ MORE: Mamie Gummer interview

Based on the novel of the same name by Susan Minot, Michael Cunningham (The Hours, A Home at the End of the World) wrote the film's screenplay. Cunningham attempts (and fails) to interpolate the book's fleeting impressionistic imagery. Ann Lord's feverishly addled recollections and drifting states of consciousness are interpreted with stock leitmotifs such as the fumbling pursuit of a butterfly into a darkened garden. The filmmakers behind Evening would surely have benefited from a sneak preview of Julian Schnablel's risky cinematic adaptation of Dominque Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which skillfully depicts a man trying to recover his past through a series of dreamlike tracings, borderline fantasies, and mingled reminiscences. Instead Cunningham emphasizes plot, subtracts some characters while developing others from the book and digresses by introducing a theme of suppressed homosexuality, plunging Lila's brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy), who is barely mentioned in the novel, into the center of the film's romantic triangle.

But even where the characterization is more fully realized, the film's sumptuously beautiful gloss smothers any emotional warmth. Despite addressing issues of loss, regret, and the mistakes humans make as parents and children, the film is curiously devoid of soul and passion.

A concluding line in the film hints at the Evening experience overall: "At the end, so much of it turns out not to matter. There is no such thing as a mistake." As it turns out, at the end, so much of this film seems not to matter. A mistake was made, however: Evening is book that would have been best left on the page.

— Karl Rozemeyer