Online only: Evening: D

In the hands of Stephen Daldry, "The Hours" was one of the best films of 2002, and is remembered as having some of the best performances of the last seven years. "Evening" was written by the same person, but in the hands of Lajos Koltai is nothing more than passing and trite melodrama masquerading as something more profound.\n It has been marketed to women and is advertised as featuring "some of the best actresses of our time." That isn't an understatement. Legends Meryl Streep and Vanessa Redgrave join Eileen Atkins, Natasha Richardson, Toni Collette, Glenn Close and Mamie Gummer in performances that are all top-notch. Each one seems to have tried very hard to do something more interesting with the badly written roles they were given. Alas, you can't make a good movie out of a bad script. \n As the lead, Claire Danes is both limited and 2-dimensional, a far cry from her nuanced "shopgirl" of 2005. It isn't all her fault though. After all, how are you supposed to act when you're character is painted as the perennial eclectic outsider when you're really a glorified lounge singer turned housewife? \n The narrative concerns a dying mother of two (Redgrave) named Ann who floats between clarity and hallucinatory visions of the past, mostly reliving memories of an evening that changed her life some fifty years before. Her daughters are Nina and Constance (Collette and real-life daughter Richardson), who sit at her bedside looking distraught and occasionally meander over their seaside mansion to have sisterly arguments where the "perfect" daughter lectures the "bad girl" on how to be a better person. The lengthy flashbacks concerning this evening all those years ago take up the bulk of the running time, and are punctuated frequently with the daughters fighting, "bad girl" Collette abusing her faithful boyfriend, Redgrave hallucinating angels that take the form of her night nurse, and one short cameo from Streep who comes to see her friend in her final moments. She is just in time for them to share a sweet, nostalgic conversation about how their lives didn't turn out the way they expected.\n The flashbacks of Ann's evening have to do with the wedding of her best friend Lila. She shows up to be the maid-of-honor and we discover that she is also close friends with Lila's brother Buddy, who might be the most sympathetic character in the film if he weren't drunk the ENTIRE time he's on screen. Buddy is in love with Ann, but she's too stupid to notice, and immediately falls in lust with Harris, Buddy's best friend the doctor, also the object of bride-to-be Lila's affection. \n Meryl Streep's future Lila says of Harris "We were all in love with him." The end of that sentence should be "for no explicable reason." Patrick Wilson has a thankless role which basically amounts to sitting around in a tux looking pretty when he's not naming stars for Claire Danes on some moonlit stroll through a forest aglow with fireflies.\n Tragedy ensues, people cry, A LOT at different points throughout the film. It's more like something from the deadly romantic pen of Nicholas Sparks than a serious meditation of the lives and loves of a group of complex women, which was the lasting contribution of "The Hours," Cunningham's beautiful early work.