“Anyone following the woman’s story would think about what’s
important in their own lives, what they cared about the most, and
how they would want to live their own lives moving forward.”
Author and screenwriter
SUSAN MINOT
“What a gift it was to read this script. It addresses what is important
to all of us; the desire for security, the search for someone to love,
and how the decisions we make carry through the rest of our lives
and our children’s lives. As our children make their own way in the
world, will they know the moments that defined us? And will they
learn from what we did or didn’t do?”
LAJOS KOLTAI
Budapest-born Lajos Koltai, an Academy Award-nominated cinematographer, had recently made his feature directorial debut with the uniquely realized Holocaust story Fateless. Sharp notes, “We were looking at directors across the whole filmmaking spectrum. At the urging of a Focus executive, Michael and I went to Manhattan’s Film Forum movie theater one afternoon to see Fateless.
“From the opening scenes, we realized that we were in the hands of a master filmmaker – a virtuoso. He gets inside his characters and has a deep understanding of the human condition, and how we all aspire to something better; even if we don’t attain it, there is that basic human desire to try. That was evident in Fateless, and needed to be in Evening as well. Coupling that with his sophisticated eye and sense of film as a visual medium, we thought he would bring the right sensibility to this material. So we went back to Focus and said, ‘This is our guy.’ We then got the script to Lajos, and he responded immediately.”
Evening is a deeply emotional film that illuminates the timeless love which binds mother and daughter – seen through the prism of one mother’s life as it crests with optimism, navigates a turning point, and ebbs to its close. Two pairs of real-life mothers and daughters – Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson, and Meryl Streep and Mamie Gummer – portray, respectively, a mother and her daughter and the mother’s best friend at different stages in life. Overcome by the power of memory, Ann Lord (Ms. Redgrave) reveals a long-held secret to her concerned daughters; Constance (Ms. Richardson), a content wife and mother, and Nina (Toni Collette), a restless single woman. Both are at her bedside when Ann calls out for the man she loved more than any other.
But who is this “Harris,” wonder her daughters, and what is he to our mother? While Constance and Nina try to take stock of Ann’s life and their own lives, their mother is tended to by a night nurse (Eileen Atkins) as she journeys in her mind back to a summer weekend some fifty years ago, when she was Ann Grant (Claire Danes)…
…a young woman who has come from New York City to be maid of honor at the high-society Newport wedding of her dearest friend from college, Lila Wittenborn (Ms. Gummer). The bride-to-be is jittery, and turns to her maid of honor rather than her own mother (Glenn Close) for support. Ann stays close to her friend, yet is even closer to Lila’s irrepressible brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy).
Unexpected feelings surge forth once Ann meets wedding guest Harris Arden (Patrick Wilson), a lifelong friend and intimate of the Wittenborn family. Ann’s love for Harris will change her life, and those of her daughters, forever.