Evening

We saw this beautiful movie last week. I have not read Susan Minot's book, but i thought the movie was able to capture the fragility of life, the "mistakes" one lives with and the fragility of relationships over generations. I liked Vanessa Redgrave's line of be happy and not to live in fear, and Meryl Streep saying that they are not mistakes but are a part of living ones life. Claire Danes was gorgeous as the young Ann Lord.

Here is a synopsis from the New Yorker's David Denby.

In “Evening,” based on Susan Minot’s celebrated 1998 novel, an elderly woman, Ann Lord (Vanessa Redgrave), lies dying, attended by her two daughters (Natasha Richardson and Toni Collette) and by memories of a painful and ecstatic weekend decades before. In the early fifties, at the Newport wedding of her best friend (Mamie Gummer), she divided her time between two young men—her friend’s ranting alcoholic brother (Hugh Dancy) and a handsome young doctor (Patrick Wilson), with whom she fell in love. The elderly Ann drifts in and out of memory and delirium, and the director, Lajos Koltai, aided by a screenplay written by Minot and the novelist Michael Cunningham, has concocted a remarkably complicated structure that alternates past and present, fantasy and reality. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that Vanessa Redgrave, flat on her back, makes lucid poetry and vivid emotion out of the most fragmentary and evanescent feelings. I can pay Redgrave no higher compliment than to say that if I have to watch an actor expire for two hours I would rather it be her than anyone else. Meryl Streep, as the long-ago bride now grown old, has a fine moment, too, as she lies in bed with Redgrave, and the two women look at the past, compare marriages, and make an accounting of their “mistakes”—which turn out to be merely life as it is lived, rather than as it is hoped for. As the young Ann, Claire Danes, with her broad shoulders and broad smile, has a forceful way about her that makes one want to see more.