good evening

While watching In Her Shoes (2005), I checked to see what Toni Collette will be up to next. There are a few things, but I want to talk about Evening (2007). I watched the trailer. It all reminds me of Mrs. Dalloway.

Looks like Collette and Natasha Richardson play the daughters of a dying Vanessa Redgrave. She's a bit loopy because they don't understand what she keeps going on and on about, about some guy she killed when she was younger (as Claire Danes). So in making sense of their own love lives, they have to sort out what their mother's past means (with the help of mommy's friend Meryl Streep).

Why does it remind me of Mrs. Dalloway? Well, Clarissa in her old age felt nostalgic about a complicated love triangle (actually it was more like a rectangle or a pentagon). Sure she didn't kill Peter, who was hopelessly in love with her, or prompt his suicide as she does in Evening, but she did break his heart.

And I'm sorry, but I cannot help from seeing the connection that Vanessa Redgrave played Clarissa in the 1997 filmic adaptation penned by Eileen Atkins (who's in Evening, too). Oh, and Meryl Streep was in The Hours (2002), where Virginia Woolf's book plays a large part. And Michael Cunningham, who wrote the novel on which The Hours is based (and also wrote the splendid A Home at the End of the World--the book and the screenplay), wrote this screenplay with the novel's author, Susan Minot. Minot wrote one of my favorite movies: Stealing Beauty (1996).

It looks sappy, but I will probably see it anyway in June.