Chapter twenty-three: Evening

Drifting in and out of her present day reality and memories from a single evening in her past, Ann Grant Lord (Venessa Redgrave) is lying on her deathbed wondering if she has made a mistake in her life by not marrying her first love, Harris (Patrick Wilson.)

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Lila Wittenborn (Mamie Gummer) is Ann Grant's (Claire Danes) best friend and bridesmaid at her wedding. At its core, the movie is about how Lila is having second thoughts about marrying her soon-to-be husband Charles during the weekend of the wedding, because she thinks she in love with a slightly older, nonetheless good looking boy named Harris, and has been since she was fifteen when he first denied her advances to be in a relationship. Lila's younger brother, Buddy (Hugh Dancy,) can sense this and tries to break up the marriage to keep Lila from making the biggest mistake of her life. Ann does her part to comfort Lila, but Ann and Harris grow secretly intimate away from everybody else as the weekend goes on.

Meanwhile, Buddy has confessed his love for Ann since their junior year in college together. It's a love that is unmutal. Ann's rejection sends Buddy quite literally over the edge, because he jumps into the lake of the family house where his sister's wedding is being held, and dies by the end of the evening. At the weekend's end, Charles and Lila have tied the knot officially, and nothing more has come of the Ann and Harris love affair.

Ann recalls all of these moments, quite visually, talking in her sleep. It's newfound information to both of her daughters, and her youngest daughter, Nina (Toni Collette,) takes a particular interest in tracking the names of whom her mother is talking about while she sleeps. So, Nina phones Lila (now Meryl Streep) who makes the trip to visit Ann just before she dies after spending fifty years apart from each other. They reminisce on Harris' good looks and Lila's wedding. Ultimately, when Ann asks the looming questions,

"Are you happy?... Don't you think one of us should have married Harris?"

Lila answers back,

"Some days I'm happy, some days I'm miserable...I think- we did what we had to do."

At the end of the film just before Lila leaves the house and moments before Ann's death when she becomes at peace with her life, Nina asks Lila if she thinks her mother made some sort of mistake in her life. To this Lila responds,

"We can't know everything she did. We are mysterious creatures. And in the end, so much of it turns out not to matter. Listen to an old lady."

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The film is very romantic, yet bitter in the end as it ought to be, which adds to its volume. The casting is especially interesting, because Mamie Gummer is Meryl's daughter, and they both played the same character, just fifty years apart in the film's timeline. This movie was made by the same people who created The Hours in 2002, and both movies have sort of the same message regarding the delicacy, significance, and impact of mortal life.

As always, thank you for the entertainment, Meryl.