The film adaptation of Evening is as quietly desperate as the lives of the novel's central characters. As critical reaction sours, the PR turns to damage limitation , writes Belinda McKeon.
'I'm never messing with one of my own books again," announces Michael Cunningham with a theatrical flourish at the press junket for Evening, the film that bears his second major credit as a screenwriter. The first was for the adaptation of his own novel, A Home at the End of the World - an adaptation that turned out, in the scheme of things, extremely well indeed. No matter; Cunningham's not for turning. "From now on, I'm only messing with the books of other people," he says.
Tell that to Susan Minot, who was originally commissioned to write the screenplay of her 1998 novel Evening, the story of a New England woman dying in a vivid and bitter-sweet sea of her own lovelorn memories; Cunningham's blithe portrayal of himself as a messer might, for Minot, strike too close to the bone.
She, after all, was superseded by Cunningham as screenwriter when it seemed to the film's producers that she was unable to see her way out of her own story, and the screenplay rapidly became a beast of very different shapes and stripes to the slumbering, secret-vexed creature that was Minot's novel.
The setting so crucial to Minot's creation of her world - 1950s Maine, with its Wasp-ish manners and its class-riven mindset - was chopped in favour of a generic clapboard mansion on the coast of Rhode Island; the love affair at the core of the novel was glossed over in favour of the curious inflation of a minor character who, in Cunningham's hands, suddenly acquired a host of sexual, societal, cultural and even artistic crises to rival those of Richard Brown and Bobby Morrow, the male protagonists of The Hours and A Home at the End of the World, Cunningham's two novels-turned-films, put together.
Now Minot's novel is a big-budget film with a cast including Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Toni Collette and Claire Danes, and hence with the patina of Oscar winners as well as of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author as its screenwriter; Cunningham won for The Hours in 1999, though for the novel, not the screenplay, which was written - keep up! - by David Hare.
With Streep's daughter Mamie Gummer and Redgrave's daughter Natasha Richardson also among the cast - Gummer as the best friend of Redgrave's youth, Danes as Redgrave's younger self, Streep as Gummer's older self, Richardson as Redgrave's daughter and Glenn Close also making an appearance as Gummer's mother - again, keep up! - the film has an impressive number of stars attached to its name.
Unfortunately for Cunningham and Minot both, the stars of the other kind - the five-star raves, the glowing endorsements, the foaming exhortations to paste across the billboards and the newspaper columns - have not exactly followed. Evening, it turns out, is a film as quietly desperate as the predicament of its central characters. It's over-earnest.
It's over-reaching. It's shallow, it's irritating, it's deadeningly dull. "Proves that not every book deserves its own film," said the New York Times. "Pop psych," snorted the LA Times. Too sensitive, said David Denby in the New Yorker. And those were the kinder reviews.
And then there's the press junket. And, like any press junket for a film that is bearing the early signs of box-office failure, the one for Evening is geared towards one thing: damage limitation. Promised one-on-one interviews are swept unceremoniously under the umbrella of round-table dicussions, which dilute, with their inimitable blandness, all the edgier prospects and dangers of face-to-face encounters.
When the quote-grabbers for American teen and gossip magazines are planted in among the arts and culture correspondents for random European and Asian newspapers, setting in motion a sort of speed-dating approach to journalism, the publicists can rest reasonably assured that the temperature in the interview suite will never dip too far below their comfort zone, that the cast and crew can go on with their air of rigid bonhomie.
Claire Danes and Mamie Gummer, giggling about their own college days and talking about the iPod playlists they shared on set. Natasha Richardon, who plays Toni Collette's older sister in the film, churning out the requisite stories about her own teenage sibling rivalry with her skinnier, more precocious, better-at-tennis sister, Joely. Hugh Dancy describing his ideal woman as "independent, a bit challenging", while the columnist from People magazine desperately tries to get him to comment on his reported (and since confirmed) relationship with Claire Danes.
And everyone gushing about how powerful the script is, and how complex the characters, and how respectful and intuitive the director (Lajos Koltai, a Hungarian on only his second feature as director, and much more established as a cinematographer, which may explain why the film's visual sumptuousness is by far its greatest strength). It's publicity-by-numbers, with words such as "amazing" and "profound" and "incredible" doing laps up and down the walls of the room.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that he's the only non-actor in the mix, Cunningham seems the least at ease with the task at hand; faced even with the dampest questions he has about him an air of wariness, of defensiveness, of a confidence that comes across as a little jagged around the edges, a little rattled at the core.
"I think the better the novel, the more difficult it is to adapt it into another form," he says of the task of taking on Minot's book. "I think if it were some cheesy pot-boiler, it would be relatively easy to turn into a movie. But a novel like Susan's is a complete work of art in itself, and I found that I had to, while working with Susan, and while keeping the heart and the soul of the book intact, almost start over. Give it a new life. Because it already had such a profound life as a book."
He "just had a thing about Buddy", Cunningham says of his decision to turn the brother of Gummer's character Lila into a major character in the film - a character with feelings for a man as well as a woman, and a character with a very different story, and a very different ending, to the Buddy in Minot's novel. It seems telling that, while talking intently about Buddy, Cunningham blanks completely on the name of the other male character in the book - Patrick Wilson's Harris, the love interest placed by Minot at the centre of her narrative - and has to turn to a bemused-looking Koltai for help. The nervous laughter that follows seems to be the right time to ask the question about Cunningham's hit-job on some of Minot's characters.
Leaving aside the question of whether that hit-job was right or wrong - in fact, the film's dullness and dreariness, its shallow characterisation, stand not as a counter to the novel but as a compounding of its existing shortcomings; the novel is far from a perfect setting-off point - was it difficult for him, in making these decisions as a screenwriter, to put aside his perspective and his empathy as a novelist? Did understanding of the years it takes a novelist to create a set of characters, a complete fictional world, grate in any way against his awareness of the things he felt he needed to do to shape the screenplay?
Cunningham's earnest frown fades into one that looks distinctly like the real thing. "Y'know, yeah, yeah, yeah," he says, in a voice dripping with irritation. "Y'know, every writer I know personally and respect loves their characters. Knows how much it took to create a book. But isn't sanctomonious about them. And you know, frankly, that kind of mythical writer, that 'don't f*** with my brilliant prose . . . "
He scoffs. "I haven't met that writer, and if that writer exists, I wouldn't want to have much to do with them. You know, it's not the Book of Kells," he says, and the Irish reference seems aimed specifically at the Irish accent posing the pestering question. "It's not the fingernail of a saint meant for a reliquary. It is part of one's lifelong work, which is learning how to write a novel by writing a series of novels. And you die still trying to write a novel. And Susan understands that. And she didn't feel, and nor did I when they adapted The Hours, 'don't touch my beautiful people'."
Fair enough, except for the fact that David Hare barely did touch Cunningham's "beautiful people"; the novel and the film are vastly closer than is the case with Evening.
And it's perhaps debatable just how much Minot "understands" about Cunnigham's work with her characters; though she was originally scheduled to take part in today's round of interviews, she later withdrew. Still, it's not as though their collaboration (though he did most of the writing, they are credited as co-writers) was a hostile one; Minot has praised Cunningham's work with her script, and the two reportedly remain friends.
"I actually think it's enormously helpful to get another pair of eyes, another set of instincts on a story that you've grown accustomed to," says Cunningham of the process. "I could see certain things in the story that were news to Susan. We never had a fight, but we had a great sort of back-and-forth, about who these people are, how we're going to cut the action down, how we're going to make it work, as a much shorter, more compact story. And I think what we ended up with was more than the sum of our two parts as writers." And with that, the speed-dating is done. Evening doesn't ask for our number, and we don't ask for Evening's. It's probably better that way.
Evening is on limited release
