Starting Out In The Evening
Starting Out In The Evening is impeccably made and delicately acted. Frank Langella plays a venerated but obscure literary author, working on what he’s sure is his final book. Lauren Ambrose barges needfully into his peaceful scholarly life, a starstruck grad student who is deeply affected by Langella’s works. She wants to write her master’s thesis on his four lifetime novels and reintroduce him to the world - while also jumpstarting her literary criticism career and prying into the sources of inspiration for his greatest works. Needless to say, this film has no aliens or explosions.
Actually, that isn’t entirely accurate. Langella is a creator of Fine Literature in a world of cross-marketing and undignified ad copy; he’s a treasure, a relic, about whom whispers of a May-December folly would be unseemly rather than congratulatory. Ambrose wants to mount this artifact properly in a museum, exposing him or all to appreciate and for commercial success to match his intellectual merits. She is a girl born in 1982 who truly reads and analyzes great works with an intense fervor years beyond her own. They are both aliens in this modern world, circling each other in fear and recognition.
The explosions are more of the Oscar nominating kind. Ambrose’s naked adoration of her literary idol is so painfully bright, Langella has to cover her eyes just to look at her. He burns with quiet frustration with his current novel, with Ambrose’s invasiveness, with his daughter’s (Lili Taylor) floundering, with the realities of publishing in 2007. This eventually bursts from him in Act III in a single, telling gesture, as potent as a fireball.
Langella plays Leonard Schiller with infinite care and patience. The way his eyes and hands move, the way his character restrains his offended sensibilities, his privacy, his need, his shame, his disapproval, all his feelings crushed into sediment. Ambrose stands astride him, eyes and hair aflame, trying to dig him up from his premature interment. She’s brash and oblivious to (most of) her effect, and firey and determined and audacious. You would hardly recognize the perplexed teen locked in the bathroom in Can’t Hardly Wait, pulling on the mental blocks of the man who was once a sexy Dracula.
As Langella’s drifting, busy, conflicted daughter, Lili Taylor plays an odd role in the story of Ambrose and Langella. She seems to be off in another movie which also happens to have them as characters. Her romantic hits and misses seem unrelated to the protégé and her idol/mentor; I may have been too busy watching Langella’s subtle mastery of his craft to properly appreciate Taylor’s contributions to the proceedings. It’s great to have a chance to see him as an actual parent, influencing and commenting, and informing us as to his perspective, when he then feels called upon to surrogate parent Ambrose.
This is a great movie, about which I could find no complaint or overt flaw except feeling that Taylor (whom I do love) was mostly a distraction. See it if you can.
MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 11/23/07
Time in minutes 111
Director Andrew Wagner
Studio Roadside Attractions
