Starting Out in the Evening

Starting Out in the Evening

Starting Out in the Evening

Starting Out in the Evening

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 nearly enjoyable, nearly transcendent, nearly watchable version of the tired premise that a young vibrant psychotic can breathe life into an old, stodgy corpse. No news is no news, as they ought to say in production meetings. According to American cinema, all Great Writers sag into lonely, regretful decrepitude, in need of either a starstruck graduate student or a high school underachiever to make them start acting half their age. This clunker comes complete with a cast of digital video all-stars - Jesus Christ, is that Lili Taylor? again? - and new age piano music: Adam Gorgoni channeling Thomas Newman, with string arrangements when it's time to cry and acoustic guitar to cue momentary inspiration. The whole production feels like something left under the seats at a second-tier film festival circa 1998. Frank Langella is, once more, a great actor in a bad film. He does no more than the role requires, which is a mercy, given the already bloated running time; but the camera lingers on him anyway as if anticipating some curtain-chewing that never begins. For his sake, I was screaming for this movie to end years before it finally did. (It would be more accurate to say that what this movie finally does is peter out.) Lili Taylor displays her single cinematic ability, which is to play dull ambivalence with earnest conviction. Lauren Ambrose is nice to look at; she's always got a little something going on behind her disarmingly wide eyes. Too bad there's more in her eyes than in this picture. Saccharine as it was, WONDER BOYS at least had Robert Downey Jr playing a drugged up wastrel. The movie ends on what I'm sure Andrew Wagner thought was a poignant reprise of its opening shot; in fact it's just another reminder that the story goes noooowheeeere. There's a moment when a supposedly unsympathetic character sums up the film's protagonist as a white guy in a suit who goes to bed early. This is designed to reveal the speaker's superficiality, but what it actually does is accurately convey the filmmaker's unwitting tendency to hit his points on the nose. When the guy who doesn't want to have children gives the old man a bath, you know, as if he's bathing a child, we, uh, we get it, man. Really. You didn't have to show us his *. In fact, you didn't even have to make the movie. We saw FINDING FORRESTER. Actually, we didn't. We didn't have to.

A very intellectual film about an author. Frank Langela is magnificent as the author. He is shy internalized, jealous of protecting his works and words. A young graduate student approaches him and says she wants to write her masters thesis about him. The actress is the weakest link in the film--she doesn't seem to be real, and has a superficial manner that doesn't ring true. Lili Taylor as his daughter and Adrian Lester as her boyfriend are simply wonderful, and very supportive of the Author. I got an understanding of what writers. Very well written and worth seeing because it is so far off the track of most films. Once again, as in most indie films, its a slice of life and I felt I knew the Author, who was also a professor. I didn't get a feel for the students character or motivation and what was the slap for? Id like other views to explain that.

I'm not a player in the literary world, so I can't really, perhaps, accurately judge the validity of the story line. But it all seemed a bit of a fraud to me and more a romanticized and clichéd portrait of a precious literary world in New York City than any deep exploration of a writer's mind or process or even any kind of relationship with an admiring critic. Overall the acting was good but very uneven. Langella, Ambrose, and Taylor had good moments but in many places went overboard and out of control in jarring, angry overacted histrionics. Ambrose as the naïve graduate student seemed terribly stylized throughout and mostly came off as an obnoxious twit I thought, and someone that Langella as the accomplished writer would never have allowed into his space, much less become attracted to. Taylor and her neuroses as a 40 year old childless woman seemed a bit tired and overdone as well as a significant thematic distraction. The actor I thought stole the show was the fellow who played Taylor's boyfriend, Casey. His character was always consistent and convincing and seems an impressive actor. But overall the story always seemed like some sort of stereotypical view of the literary world manifested by an old writer sitting at a typewriter keyboard, pecking away on 8 1/2x11 sheets of paper. That's such a sentimental early 20th century image and barely seems realistic to me in today's world, even if you are supposed to be 70 years old or thereabouts. And Ambrose's character always seemed to be more the "star idolizer" than any serious graduate student writing a thesis. So I left the theater feeling that I had seen some sort of modern TV soap opera about "Henry James", rather than a serious portrait of the interaction between any literary student and master.

First, the acting was excellent by all 4 actors Langella, Taylor, Ambrose and Lester. Frank Langella (Leonard) was superb, from the truthfulness of physical aging, which was heartbreaking enough, to the efforts of a man in decline to hold onto himself and what he used to be. It doesn't give him the space to give love to anyone nor to focus on the book he is writing. Lili Taylor's (Ariel) role served to illustrate her father's withdrawal from those who loved him even early in her life and her subsequent dissatisfaction with a man who loved her entirely, choosing instead someone who doesn't give her what she wants. She is always ready to run, at any impediment. Adrian Lester (Casey), Ariel's boyfriend, seems to be cool, like her father, but changes with circumstances to grow and accommodate Ariel. His kindness to Ariel's father is one of the most touching scenes in the movie. Lauren Ambrose's Heather, on the other hand, is not put off by Leonard's reluctance to cooperate on her analytical project of his books for her Master's thesis. Unlike Ariel, who flees upon rejection, she thrives on it. At the beginning of the movie, she reminded me of the Eve part in "All About Eve", the ambitious star to be, who woos Bette Davis (and everyone else who can help her climb to the top) but then I started to see a relationship between the two. She helps him thaw out. She seeks to solve the mystery in the difference between his first two books and his later two, with Heather loving the former and Lester thinking of the last book as great. Between the two sets of books, the style has changed dramatically. This is a source of Heather's thesis, what accounts for the difference? To find out she has to get into Leonard's psyche, once she does, his reserve starts to thaw out. There are clues to the ongoing relationship in Heather's behavior at a restaurant with Leonard and in the slap he gives her, when, for the first time in her association with him, she is obviously insincere. Watching this movie is like reading a book carefully to get not just the plot but the substance. If you do, this movie rewards you with enjoyment beyond that of watching a movie and gives you insights into the characters and their actions.

Starting Out In The Evening is a film high on aspirations, but short on substance. It is among a small list of films to come out in recent years that attempt to understand the world surrounding a literary genius. While the movie is a nice study of human relationships, it is not so successful in portraying its central characters: an aging writer and a young academic. The story essentially deals with the fallout from Leonard Schiller's life as a writer. His personal shortcomings, as both father and husband, are to be read as essential to his success as a writer. Similarly, his writing is shown to have fatally wounded his daughter, as she takes up with men who make her invisible, just as he had done while writing his novels. Put another way, his daughter has learned to subordinate herself to the dreams of others; and deep down Schiller knows this. We, of course, learn that contradictions are almost always visible, and almost always irritating, because they illuminate our own hypocrisy. This is why Schiller dislikes Casey. But Schiller, in a predictable turn, is forced to undergo change when Casey disproves his idea "that people never change," by taking him to the hospital and showing him kindness at a time of great vulnerability. Yet, this sudden change of heart is too predictable to be believable. I feel like the characters in this film grew personally, but their growth always felt forced: they grew in ways that were to be expected and all at pace with the narrative. Real life is rarely like that. My biggest complaint about the film is on the authenticity of the main characters: Leonard and Heather. As a graduate student, of literature, I found it amusing that references to great works, and one-liners about literary style were invoked to give credibility to these two characters. I never really felt that Leonard was actually a writer; I only felt that I was supposed to believe he was a writer because he had lots of books and a typewriter in his study. Similarly, Heather didn't seem like an academic; she seemed like a girl at a dinner party who could feign literary erudition. Heather and Leonard's conversations were laughable, especially when the subject of their conversations is literature. This aspect of the film was disappointing because I was hoping to see a study of writing process and imagination; I was also hoping to see an honest portrayal of a burgeoning intellectual. So I was very disappointed to see contrived dialog in substitution for believable character detail. I think the film could have been strengthened if we had seen more of Leonard writing and more of Heather reading. For example, when Heather opened one of Schiller's novels, there wasn't a note or mark or anything in the margins. The book looked brand new; it didn't look like it had been "read to death." I may be nitpicking here, but little details like this could have made the film more authentic—and wasn't that the goal? I enjoyed the film for its look into our fickle lives and relationships, but I came into it with an expectation that I would learn about a writer and his world. Yet, I only got to live in the aftermath of his world. I wanted to see Schiller labor over the keys of his manual typewriter, in his quiet desperation to solidify his literary legacy—and in the process his life. Instead, I got to see Ariel, his daughter, struggle to right herself in the aftermath of his neglect; I got to see a pseudo-intellectual find herself in pursuit of her thesis; and I got to see an old man find resolve in his darkest hour. E.M Forester says that "what is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote." Starting Out In The Evening was supposed to take us to the "heart" of Leonard Schiller, but it instead, took us to the periphery.

This is without doubt one of the most curdled, stiltingly boring movies I have ever seen. The self indulgent pretensions of the writer, director and actors are celebrated and regurgitated for a mind numbing two hours. Frank Langella is a fabulous stage presence ill served with this atrocious script. No one on this planet talks the way he has these characters converse - except for smirking little literary pretenders without an ounce of creativity or artistic talent. The unappealing and untalented supporting cast does their tortured best to support the thesis that a horrible script can be overcome by a cast celebrating the holy grail of literature. Hogwash. This is deplorable self indulgence like I've never seen. I HATED this movie. And don't believe any of these positive reviews. You don't think these little Indie films have figured out the upside of loading up the IMDb site?