As you can see from the poster, the selling point for ‘Evening’ is that perennial marketing failsafe – the “stellar cast”. Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Claire Danes and Toni Collette all grace the screen in this two-hour adaptation of Susan Minot’s novel.

The film is a soppy affair, which begins with two sisters Nina and Constance (Toni Collette and Natasha Richardson) tending their mother Ann (Vanessa Redgrave) at her deathbed. In her frail and increasingly detached state Ann begins to mumble about fragments of her past life, and latches onto one particular secret from her past which intrigues Nina, and provides an insight into a crucial turning point in her elderly mother’s life.

The narrative flits between the fragmented memories of Ann’s past and her twilight moments with her daughters, interspersed with short scenes hinting at the dwindling mental capacities of the ageing narrator, and the misty secrets of her fading memories. One scene depicts Ann rising from her bed, apparently alive and well, in order to pursue a moth – clearly representing her elusive memories – downstairs where she reaches her daughters and crouches, symbolically unseen, beside them as they ruminate on their present problems. Unfortunately this obvious imagery is as good as it gets. Throughout the entire film this is perhaps the only scene in which I felt screenplay might have added something to the original prose form of the story.

This is surprising for two reasons. Firstly, Minot converted her novel into a screenplay herself. “Why is this surprising?” you may ask, “authors do this all the time!” Yes they do, but they normally attempt to transfer a complete work into a whole new medium to add dimensions to the world they created, to bring characters to life. Minot’s effort fails to do either. The film didn’t flow properly, it gave the impression that the scenes were compiled as a ‘best of’ collection from the novel, a series of moments specially selected for their drama or heightened emotion. This meant that each scene wanted to be a climax and failed miserably. Dramatic peaks were poorly interwoven into the split narrative, for example in one scene Ann is mumbling about her lost love before blurting out “we killed Buddy!” Guess what happens in the next scene? Oh, her actions inadvertently cause the death of a man named Buddy. Hardly a master class in tension-building. The second reason the film’s weaknesses are surprising is that this is not Minot’s first attempt at a screenplay. She has, in fact, managed to bring us one other cinematic delight in the form of Bertolucci’s equally hollow and trivially sentimental offering ‘Stealing Beauty’. Her previous jaunt into cinema may have been missable, but I personally would have expected her to learn from her mistakes.

Nonetheless, it is perhaps a little harsh to lay the film’s failings at the feet of Minot. She was not the sole screenwriter and rumours circulated that her vision for the film conflicted with that of her co-screenwriter and fellow author Michael Cunningham, and the film departs from the original novel at several points. The switches between the past and present in the film are clunky and far less subtle than in the novel, and whilst the novel aims to contrast a grim present with a halcyon past, the film presents an image of a life lived to the full, a life that perpetuates itself in all its mediocre glory every time we reproduce. Hardly a conclusion worthy of a novelist of Minot’s talents. Director Lajos Koltai must also shoulder his share of the blame for failing to make the most out of this story, after all if a cast this strong cannot save a film, what can?

On leaving the cinema, what I was left with was a sense that the film was an incomplete jigsaw. The Ann’s memories hinted at regret, but the characters of her past were not sufficiently developed to allow the audience to understand why she regretted their loss, or to empathise with the plight which she suffered with them. The characters of the present – Nina and Constance – came across as contrived, and added little to the already weak core motifs of the story. Whether you want to an emotional drama, some pretty cinematography, or a clever study of memory and loss from this film – you will be disappointed.