January 3, 2008 | Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) is a retired professor and out-of-print novelist who has spent the last decade of his golden years at work on a book with no end in sight. An elegant and erudite gentleman, he goes about his work with old-school precision and formality: He actually wears a tie as he slowly pecks away at his typewriter. Yes, a typewriter, not a computer. That’s the sort of traditionalist he is.
Maybe he’s being honest with himself, maybe not, when he politely but firmly tells Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), an ambitious magazine writer and graduate student, that he’s ever so sorry, but he simply cannot help her with her master’s thesis – a critical study of his four completed novels – because he’s much too busy trying to complete his fifth (and, presumably, final) work. She presses, with unexpected passion. He rebuffs, with flustered politeness.
But then Leonard has a change of heart, triggered in part by the realization that, although he once was a New York literary luminary mentioned in the same breath with Saul Bellow, nowadays he’s rarely mentioned at all, anywhere. So he agrees to a series of probing interviews by Heather in his spacious Upper West Side apartment. Slowly, warily, he warms to her questions about his art. With greater reluctance, he talks about his life as well. And one thing leads to another.
Don’t be too quick to assume, however, that you can guess the ultimate destination of Starting Out in the Evening, the exceptionally fine and flawlessly acted film that discreetly charts this relationship between aged author and youthful admirer. Working from a novel by Brian Morton, writer-director Andrew Wagner covers what initially seems like familiar territory with intelligence, compassion and allusive understatement, allowing his four central characters more than sufficient room to reveal themselves, in all their complexities and contradictions, in ways that often surprise and always engross.
It’s an intimate drama – a chamber piece, really – that deals intelligently with intriguing themes and provocative ideas regarding the ambiguous motives and borrowed-from-life material that fuel the creative process. Just as important, it’s also about maintaining equilibrium, and some degree of dignity, while in the thrall of obsession. Leonard, driven by what he calls “the madness of art,” steadfastly works on a novel he might not live to finish, and may never be published. Ariel (the great Lili Taylor), Leonard’s 40-year-old daughter, puts career advancement on hold – a former dancer, she’s now a personal trainer – while anxiously responding to the metronome tick of her biological clock. Unfortunately, her soul mate — Casey (Adrian Lester) — doesn’t want children. But that may not be an insurmountable obstacle for a woman willing to take, or not take, certain steps.
There are no heroes or villains here, just complicated individuals who get by as best they can, regretting past mistakes even as they risk making new ones. The performances are excellent across the board, which makes it easier for Morton to generate a fair degree of suspense – some of it of the erotically-charged sort – while revealing just so much, and withholding the rest, leaving his audience to wonder: Is Heather all that she appears? (Ambrose, to her great credit, plays her cards close to the vest.) Is she right when she claims Leonard’s first two novels – written before his wife’s death – were more “personal” than the books that followed? And if she’s right, what are we to make of the fact that Leonard, and Casey, claim one of those later novels is the author’s best?
On more than one occasion, the aged author pointedly reminds his young admirer that even deeply personal art isn’t always autobiographical, that a creation can, and maybe should, be fully enjoyed without intimate knowledge of its creator. (Heather, not surprisingly, begs to differ.) But consider this: Langella’s richly detailed and subtly nuanced performance arguably is all the more impressive and affecting if you approach it with some knowledge of the actor’s other work.
Throughout nearly four decades of estimable work in film and theater, Langella has remained highly visible at a level somewhere between superstar and journeyman. Early in his film career – specifically, in 1970, when he gave back-to-back, attention-grabbing performances in Frank Perry’s Diary of Mad Housewife and Mel Brooks’ The Twelve Chairs – he appeared poised to break out as a hot-hunk leading man. Later in the ‘70s, he evidenced similarly sexy potential when he starred in a popular Broadway revival of Dracula, then repeated his smoldering portrayal of the bloodthirsty count in an indifferently received movie version. For one reason or another, however, the magic didn’t happen, and movie stardom eluded him.
But Langella has continued to earn awards and dazzle audiences in a remarkably diverse variety of stage roles – local theatergoers might remember his Henry Higgins in a Houston Grand Opera revival of My Fair Lady a few years back – while occasionally making his presence felt (and appreciated) as a supporting player in indie and mainstream movies. His may not be a household name, but it’s nonetheless a name that carries weight with those who have admired his work.
And so, when Heather first approaches Leonard, the literary lion in winter, with equal measures of giddy excitement and respectful deference, it’s easy to image the actor playing Leonard generating the same response in a fan who recalls, say, Langella’s 1975 Tony Award-winning turn in Edward Albee’s Seascape, and who has followed the actor’s career ever since. An objective observer – like the cynical magazine editor in Starting Out in the Evening, who dismisses Leonard as a forgotten relic from another era — might question why anyone would get so excited about encountering a figure so far removed from the A-list. But, as Louis Armstrong once quipped, “There are some people that, if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.”
You will have to see the movie to discover for yourself whether Leonard can finish his novel and emerge from semi-obscurity. But, again, it’s interesting to measure Langella’s own progress with that of his character. The actor, who turned 70 on New Year’s Day, is enjoying yet another career renaissance, as the volume of Oscar buzz steadily increases for his work here, and audiences eagerly await his reprise of another Tony Award-winning performance, as former President Richard M. Nixon, in Ron Howard’s upcoming film adaptation of the acclaimed play Frost/Nixon. It may be late in the evening, but there’s still much that can be accomplished.
