A dying old woman reflects on the happiest moments of her life and remembers her one true love. Meanwhile, her daughters struggle to learn more about their mother’s past and in turn learn more about themselves.

EVENING is one of those films that just struggled. It struggled to make sense, it struggled to tell the story, and it struggled to add the necessary depth to the characters. It was a rough film that seemed to have too many misses and lacked a lot of what a drama needs to be great.

My first problem with the film was with the editing. The story is told in two timelines. We have present day, which features the daughters and their lives, then the second, which is the flashback of the mother’s lost love. At first, the story is broken up way too much and neither storyline gets going. Then the editor/director settles down and we get more established scenes. Unfortunately, they don’t really mesh up very well and one story doesn’t have an impact on the other.

That leads to the second problem, which is the lack of focus. The way the story was told, I fully expected there to be some tie-in at the end which would link the two stories together. However, it’s clear at the end that the stories are basically independent of each other and could have very well been two separate films. As far as the story goes, I found both lines a little boring, but the flashback line was frustrating because the loss of love dictates the whole story, yet we don’t get a decent reason they didn’t get together.

The performances were pretty decent. I thought Hugh Dancy did the best job, but his character had more going on than the others. The rest of the cast put in normal performances, but Meryl Streep was severely underused. She appears for about five minutes and during that time, she reminiscing with Vanessa Redgrave about what we just saw. I felt like I’d walked in on my grandma’s knitting club.

Video: Widescreen (1.85:1): The setting in the film was a lake house and the colors and images were beautiful. The transfer was pretty nice overall.

Audio: English and French 5.1 with English, French and Spanish subtitles: The audio was fine and did its job.

Deleted Scenes (5:09): These were worthless scenes that wouldn’t have impacted the film one way or the other. However, given that, I would say I’m glad they were cut.

One Weekend by the Sea (16:15): This is your typical making of featurette complete with too many movie scenes and not enough behind the scenes footage. It was decent, but wasn’t much more than a fluff piece.

Adapting Evening (9:37): This focuses on the adaptation from the book. I recommend this for those of you that have read the book. Otherwise you probably won’t care.

There are also some Previews

I wasn’t a fan of EVENING because it wasn’t done well enough to make up for the boring storylines. It had a lot of problems and there really isn’t one magical fix. I suggest forgetting about this one.