Evening

Despite its stellar female cast, high-gloss production and soft-sheen polish, director Lajos Koltai’s adaptation of Susan Minot’s book never quite sweeps you as sumptuously as it promises.

Unfortunately, this DVD release is perhaps even more underwhelming.

There are five brief deleted scenes. The first sees the two sisters Nina and Connie ‘sharing’ again and the remainder feature Ann, two practically from the same rain-drenched scene with Harris and Ralph. They add little to the film, but perhaps nod more towards the source material.

One Weekend By The Sea: Remembering Evening is a standard Making Of featurette, running at slightly more than 15 minutes. All of the estimable female cast, save Meryl Streep, gets a chance to gush, with Koltai and producer Jeffrey Sharp opening their sluice gates, too. Performances, locations, set designs, direction, everything gets the once over but there’s very little of substance to be gleaned.

Adapting Evening is the most interesting featurette, especially for any fans of the book. Screenwriter Michael Cunningham (The Hours) talks more engagingly about his sensitive handling of Susan Minot’s own draft screenplay. Minot also gets a look in regarding the development of her original inspirations. Any hopes of revelatory details are curtailed by the eight-minute running time.

The film itself benefits from a superior transfer that shows the warm tones and period details well. The soundtrack is solid and complemented with hard of hearing subtitles. But here’s a bugbear. If someone needs subtitles for the film, they’re going to need them for the featurettes as well. The extras are hardly going to fill your evening, but shouldn’t they at least be accessible for everyone who might actually shell out for the disc?

Disappointing.