Starting Out in the Evening

It should come as no surprise that this quietly affecting character study barely left a trace in theaters last year since movies about literature and the writing process are hardly fodder for young teenaged boys looking for outsized CGI-saturated extravaganzas. However, co-writer/director Andrew Wagner's ("The Talent Given Us") sophomore effort benefits immeasurably from Frank Langella's deeply nuanced performance as a once-renowned novelist long forgotten and facing his own mortality as he attempts to finish a valedictorian work ten years in development. With his recognizably sonorous voice and intensely watchful manner, the 68-year-old actor has never been known for playing sympathetic roles, but he seizes the heart of a becalmed man so engulfed in the creative process that he reacts to any intrusion upon it with a subtle, leonine fury. It's been nearly four decades since his film debut as the egotistical, caddish writer in Frank Perry's "Diary of a Mad Housewife", but what a treat to see him bookend that performance with this one.

Langella portrays New York-based Leonard Schiller, whose four published novels have been out of print for years. In declining health, Schiller tries to interest a publisher friend in his latest, yet-to-be-completed novel, but he is told there is no market for literary-type novels. Precipitously, an enthusiastic graduate student named Heather Wolfe walks into Schiller's intensely private life to request a series of interviews for a masters thesis she wants to write about him. She is such an unabashed fan that her goal is no less than having Schiller rediscovered. The author is initially resistant, but he wears down under her coquettish persistence. At the same time, Schiller's self-loathing daughter Ariel has grown up being used to playing second-fiddle to her father's work. Single and closing in on forty, she hears her biological clock ticking as she resuscitates an embattled relationship with her estranged lover Casey, who is equally vehement about not having children. The plot threads eventually mesh when Schiller opens up to Heather and realizes how dormant he has kept his feelings since his wife's death over two decades earlier.

Beyond Langella is a trio of solid performances though none nearly as impressive as his. Lauren Ambrose ("Six Feet Under") captures Heather's youthful vigor and innate intelligence, but I found her use of Lolita-style wiles to be a bit mechanical within the scheme of the storyline. Always worth watching, Lili Taylor is on pretty familiar territory as the conflicted Ariel, but she manages to bring her likeably neurotic manner to the role. I haven't seen Adrian Lester since Mike Nichols' "Primary Colors", but he's a welcome addition here as the slow-to-evolve Casey, especially in a tense small-talk scene with Schiller during Ariel's birthday celebration. In fact, much of the dialogue by Wagner and co-writer Fred Parnes has a smart, insightful quality that doesn't call undue attention to the intellectual observations of the characters. Even more, their strong screenplay makes the series of rude awakenings toward the end resonate with a combination of heart and necessary harshness. The 2008 DVD is short on extras - Wagner's thoughtful commentary and the theatrical trailer - but this small-scale film is well worth discovering, especially to see Langella at the very top of his game.

A typically strong and thoughtful performance by the great Frank Langella and good supporting actors make this study of a once promising New York Jewish novelist in decline worth watching, but stagnation mars the plot and the film. Leonard Schiller lives alone in a comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side. He's retired from a life of teaching, his earlier novels are all out of print, and he has been struggling for years to complete the latest one. He's regularly visited by his daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor), a woman on the cusp of forty, once passionate about dancing, who has settled into teaching Pilates and yoga. She has wanted to have a baby before her biological clock runs out, but her man wasn't willing and fled to Chicago. Along comes an aggressive young redhead from Brown named Heather (Lauren Ambrose) to interview Leonard for her MA thesis on his work. She stirs things up for a while. But then they settle back to where they were.

Leonard is so shut down you want to shake him. Langella makes a powerful impression—he's what you remember after the movie's over—but you wish he'd let the character breathe a bit more. The film's most memorable scenes are certainly those in which he and Heather timidly touch and the merest shadow of a May-December romance briefly appears, surprising Leonard and us.

The heart of the story, however, is what role Leonard's life has had in his art, and how his dedication to the art may have stunted his life and the lives of those around them. The screenplay (and presumably the book by Brian Morton on which Fred Parnes and Wagner based it) valiantly tries to deal with a novelist in terms of his novels—only the approach is hardly what you could call "literary." Heather turns out to love this writer because strong women characters in his first two books inspired her to break with a clingy boyfriend and go away to college. Schiller's first novels "set her free." His second two novels she can't understand because they changed focus to politics and the strong, independent women dropped out. Wanting to get a handle on that, Heather learns it happened because Schiller's wife died. Prying eventually reveals that neither the wife nor the marriage was as ideal as Schiller represents them. Schiller fights Heather's investigations every step of the way, and sensibly opposes her simplistic biographical approach. He ends by dismissing her thinking and her thesis with remarkable detachment, considering her attentions flattered him. Nonetheless Heather's interest and warmth and eventually what seems to be her love seem to reinvigorate him—for a while, anyway. In the end it all appears to have been too much for him.

Ariel seems a nice contrast to her father, lively and natural; and Taylor is well cast for the role. The Ariel subplot injects life into what might be a numbing portrait. But as time goes on it's clear Ariel is just as stuck as Leonard but without any creative accomplishments behind her. In a moment of crisis she calls an old number and finds that Casey (Adrian Lester), her African American ex-lover, is back in town and ready to resume the relationship. Appropriately for the story's themes, he's a leftist intellectual involved with a journal. It emerges that personally he's as stuck as everybody else. Things still have to be on his terms.

'Evening's' literary details are authentic as far as they go. There are some receptions with schmoozing by Heather, and the identity of a once-respected has-been is well established for Schiller. He presses the literary criticism of Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and Edmond Wilson on his young admirer. If she's made a specialty of his work and his period, wouldn't she know about them? Whether intended or not, Heather comes across as strong and vibrant, but direct and confrontational to the point of rudeness and disrespect, and shallow as a scholar. One review of this film has suggested she's more like a tabloid journalist. And she is ambitious enough to try to get her MA summary published as a piece in The Village Voice. She keeps claiming she can get Leonard's books back into print. Surprisingly, after becoming a part of Schiller's life, which she is obviously obsessed with, she drops out of it, just when he's in trouble. Schiller's Jewishness is a routine declaration; the screenplay forgets to give him a life that bears it out. Ultimately the movie is as frustrating as the situations of the principals. It promises more than it performs. Langella isn't perfectly cast. He manages to appear stubborn and defeated, but he looks too robust (and too young) for his character. His acting commands attention always, here in its very understatement it's a marvel. But it's too consistent: you still want to shake him. Ultimately you wonder why a film should revolve around such a character. Despite the best intentions, various things have gone wrong.

Unlike many movies, I found myself continually wanting to know what happens next. I was not watching a movie, so much as seeing the writing process examined, explored, and enacted on the screen. The director doesn't mind taking his time to allow events to develop and unfold, and he takes us along with him. Music is used sparingly and effectively - he has faith in his actors and his material. The attention to detail was wonderful - Leonard Schiller wearing shirts and ties many many years old, using spoons and tea cups from another era, sitting on a couch from the 40's, reading by lamps with pleated shades, walls and cupboards painted many times over, using a typewriter (hearing the clack clack of the keys was music), contrasted by Heather's tic tic on her laptop, her messy bed in the background, typing by a stylish modern lamp. Lauren Ambrose was the perfect counterpoint to Frank Langella, and the subplot with Lili Taylor as Ariel Schiller and Adrian Lester was touching and effective. At all times, the actors were perfect. They should all win Oscars, but they won't. Please don't be fooled by the paltry box office take of $600,000 - this movie is worthy of box office 100 times what it took in.

Anyone with a love of writing, good acting, and wonderful direction should see this movie. Even having Schilling's body begin to fail him rings true, and is not played for pathos.

All in all, one of the most enjoyable movie experiences of 2007.

Movies about literary people too often sound like books rather than movies. The way characters talk doesn't jive with the way people actually sound in real life. Dialogue sounds scripted, phrases and speeches are too well put together.

This is a trap "Starting Out in the Evening" doesn't avoid, but it's easy to overlook that minor flaw, as the rest of the film is intelligent and thoughtful. The main reason to watch is Frank Langella, playing Leonard Schiller, an aging novelist who the world has forgotten and who is tempted to hope that his name might be revived by an idolatrous grad student who wants to do her thesis on his work. The grad student (Lauren Ambrose) is pushy and rather unlikable, but it makes sense that Leonard would take to her, as only someone as pushy as she could break through his reclusive facade. The relationship these two embark upon is complicated to say the least, and both actors navigate the tricky terrain well.

A subplot involves Leonard's daughter (played by Lili Taylor, who it was a pleasure to see again) and her rekindled relationship with a man of whom Leonard does not approve (Adrian Lester).

"Starting Out in the Evening" is one of those ultra-sombre movies that takes place in the dead of winter, when everything is cold and dead, and in which the predominant color scheme is brown and gray. But the cast brings enough vitality to the film, and the screenplay is unpredictable enough, that the end product is engaging rather than depressing.

Grade: A-

STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING is a quietly moving work of art, a film adapted from Brian Morton's novel by screenwriters Fred Parnes and Andrew Wagner and directed by Andrew Wagner that dares to take us to the wall with decisions we make about how we conduct our lives and negotiate the changes that can either be stumbling blocks or stimuli for creative awareness, It has much to say about the creative process of writing, a theme upon which it first appears to be based, but it more importantly urges us to examine how we live - how we make use of this moment of time in which we inhabit a body in the universe.

Leonard Schiller (in an extraordinarily understated performance by Frank Langella) is an aging author, a man whose first two novels seem to set the literary world on fire, but whose next two novels languished on the shelves and slipped into the same plane of obscurity Schiller finds his life since the death of hi wife. He has a daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor in another richly hued performance) who is nearing age forty and is unable to bond permanently with a man because of her obsession with having children before her biological clock ticks past fertility. Into their lives comes Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), a bright young graduate student who has elected to write her master's thesis on the works of Leonard Schiller. Schiller is absorbed in writing what may be his last novel and can't be bothered with Heather's plea for a series of interviews. But curiosity intervenes and soon heather and Leonard are involved in the process of interviewing, a process which gradually builds into overtones of heather' physical as well as intellectual attraction to Leonard. Meanwhile Ariel observes the process that seems to be infusing life into her father and encourages her to exit her current relationship with Victor (Michael Cumpsty) and re-connect with the true love of her life Casey (Adrian Lester), a man she loves but who refuses to give her the children she so desperately wants. The manner in these characters interact and learn from each other the importance of sharing Life instead of obsessing with selfish goals brings the drama to a rather open-ended close, another factor that makes this story significantly better than most themes of May-December romance and unilateral coping with self centered directions.

The pleasures of this film are many, but among the finest is the quality of acting by Langella, Taylor, Ambrose, and Lester. In many ways the story is a parallax of views of life as art that subtly intertwine like a fine string quartet. Why this film was ignored by the Oscars only suggests that movies for the mind take second place to movies for the merriment of entertainment. For people who enjoy the challenge of a meaty story, this film is a must. Grady Harp