***
DVD Release
As Ann lays dying, she remembers
the wedding weekend of her best friend, Lila, and the passionate love affair
she experienced with another wedding guest, Harris.
So, maybe I’m just a massive
cynic when it comes to all this lovey stuff, but the main premise of this story
is that two people, after only spending one weekend together in their entire
lives, believe the other to be their soul mate. I’m sorry, I know this is
fiction, but the fact that Ann is still pining over this one man years and
years after is a little obsessive, but maybe it is not the man she longs for,
but the time when she was happiest and had the whole world at her feet. The
younger Ann (played by Claire Danes) is to be the bridesmaid to Lila (Mamie Gummer),
whose little brother, Buddy (Hugh Dancy) she is also best friends with. At the
wedding, Harris (Patrick Wilson) makes an appearance and everything spirals out
of control, and the lives of the four young people are changed forever. In the
present day, Ann (Vanessa Redgrave) shifts between delirium and the real world,
her mind mainly focussed on the wedding weekend fifty years before. Helpless,
her two daughters (Toni Colette and Natasha Richardson) look on, whilst
battling their own guilt. The lives of the two daughters are certainly the most
boring aspect of the film and their fighting seems so clichéd it doesn’t pack
the emotional punch it is clearly meant to. There are some interesting moments
wherein the older Ann imagines she is talking to the ‘Night Nurse’ about her
life, but the main point of interest is clearly based on the wedding and the
film flags when it is not in that setting.
There is certainly a plethora of
stars in the cast (Glenn Close and Meryl Streep also make an appearance) but
the whole film is just painfully average. There is no ‘great love’ story to
mark it out from other films of the genre, although there is a great deal of
tragedy. All the characters seem a little one-dimensional, and the love affair
between Ann and Harris is pretty stagey. It romps along at a fairly good pace,
however, and the whole film looks beautiful – it is certainly not a ‘bad’ film,
just quite average.
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