STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING

Directed by Andrew Wagner; written by Fred Parnes and Andrew Wagner, based on the novel by Brian Morton; director of photography, Harlan Bosmajian; edited by Gena Bleier; music by Adam Gorgoni Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes.
With: Frank Langella, Lili Taylor, Lauren Ambrose, and Adrian Lester. Rated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes

Reviewed by Joel Johnson

This is a film that I know my editor will enjoy. I say this because we have had more than a few conversations over the years about films that focus on the lives of various artists and writers. The biggest problem with these films is that they often have difficulty in showing the person engaged in their art form. The focus tends to be on their often chaotic personal lives, with conflicted relationships, abandoned lovers, multiple spouses, unbridled chemical experimentation, and self-destructive behavior, both deliberate and happenstance. The depicted lives may be colorful, entertaining, tawdry, and bizarre, but they don’t help inform the audience about how the art form fits into the person’s life.

This is not to say that this interior creative process is readily accessible to filmmakers because this is, indeed, a difficult process to capture on film. What director Andrew Wagner and screenwriter Fred Parnes-working from Brian Morton’s novel-have accomplished is to create the Manhattan literary world within which their main character, Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), continues to try to survive and be relevant. He meets an ambitious graduate student named Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), who dreams of single-handedly reintroducing this writer whose work is out-of-print to contemporary readers. Initially disinterested in opening himself up to her scrutiny, he begins to realize he needs help to overcome his dinosaur status in the publishing world.

A symbiotic, yet faintly rancid, relationship develops between the aging author and the student young enough to be his granddaughter as they both seek to use the other to grasp their own version of the brass ring. They discuss the ideas around which novels spring and the personal experiences from which written characters emerge, but Schiller bristles when Heather tries to excavate his personal life. There’s a palpable whiff of sexuality in Heather’s overtures.

We do get introduced to Schiller’s unsettled and underachieving fortyesh daughter, Ariel (Lili Taylor), with whom it is clear that her father has had less involvement than with the characters in his books. The biological and surrogate daughters regard each other warily though manage to cooperate in dealing with Schiller’s failing health. Ariel hears her biological clock ticking as she tries to sort out the dilemmas that most young women resolve in early adulthood. She’s seeing a man her father likes with whom she would have a child yet is reluctant to marry. The man she loves is Casey (Adrian Lester), a genial and thoughtful black man that her father disdains.

Lurking off-camera though deeply embedded in Schiller’s writing is the wife and mother who long ago left the home for a lover. This is a well-written and well-acted film that allows its characters to struggle with life, to engage each other, and to grow. Frank Langella anchors the film with a terrific performance, and he has a pretty strong case for negligence against the Academy for its failure to nominate his performance for an Oscar. This is probably the best film that I’ve ever seen about what it means to live with and to live as a working writer, but it is simply a terrific film about life.