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And this year’s award for Biggest Waste of an A-List Cast goes to… Evening. Films like this one just drive critics crazy. Our job is to stay awake through the whole thing, even during the worst movies. Evening is not a bad movie, but it sure tries its hardest to put us asleep.

The film has some spectacular scenery, including some beautiful shots of the sun shining over a lake. It also carries with it some fine performances from today’s and yesterday’s greatest actresses, a list that includes Vanessa Redgrave, Claire Daines, Toni Collette and a couple of cameos from Meryl Streep and Glenn Close. Also, the film has a beautiful, and powerful musical score, but if only the overly boring plot were half as exciting as that.

The film is about two-thirds flashback, one-third present. Redgrave plays one of the more simple roles of her career, one in which she rarely even needs to get out of bed. Apparently her character, Ann, has a terminal illness and is spending the last few days of her life on her death bed, having a flashback to her days as a young woman when she made some regrettable mistakes.

Her younger self is played by Claire Daines, and the film works best when the camera is on her. Daines is the only one that had my attention the whole way through, mostly because she is so darn cute. She is visiting her friend, Lila (Mamie Gummer, The Hoax), who is getting married. Apparently Ann is dating Lila’s brother, Buddy, but the relationship doesn’t seem too serious as she quickly falls in love with Lila’s other brother, Harris (Patrick Wilson, Little Children) and Buddy doesn’t seem to mind at all.

These flashbacks to the 40′s (or 50′s, the film doesn’t really specify) are stunningly well shot. Periodically we switch back to present day where Ann is hallucinating in a couple of scenes that come off as strange, to put it mildly. We also watch the reaction of Ann’s two daughters, Nina (Toni Collette, Little Miss Sunshine) and Constance (Natasha Richardson, Maid in Manhattan).

Evening is one of the most tedious films you’ll see all year, and it never once offers to quicken up the pace. The film is all about death and never really comes to life. If you’re film is about a character having a flashback on her deathbed, one would assume that character had an interesting life. That’s not necessarily the case here. It’s two hours long and nothing remotely interesting happens until about 80 minutes down the road. It is filled with soft-spoken dialogue that makes you tune in extra hard to the point of giving you a headache. It’s one of those movies that tries to talk you to death. And with cheesy lines like, “I wanna sing on Mars,” it just might succeed.

Every time the movie starts to get a little interesting, it just tells you “go back to sleep.” Simply put: the movie is boring. The scene where Ann is singing (for two whole minutes) at Lila’s wedding reception is the closest I’ve come this year to falling asleep in the theater. Evening tries to add a little life by throwing in some stunningly scenic shots and a wonderfully composed musical score, but it’s just not enough.

The acting is fine here, but it is a little bit falsely advertised. Glenn Close and Meryl Streep don’t have actual major roles, they’re just there for a scene or two and then they’re off to the bank to cash their paycheck. Close plays Lila’s mother and Streep plays the older version of Lila who visits Ann on her deathbed. Close is in about three scenes while Streep is in just one.

Ultimately, Evening just doesn’t have all that much to offer. It has an A-list cast but doesn’t have an interesting plot to go along with it. It’s a sappy chick-flick that plays the ‘weeper’ card, but it never had my interest long enough for me to even come close to shedding tears. There’s only about twenty minutes of a good film here and if not for the outstanding cast, this would be a straight to Hallmark production.