Straight to DVD

Starting Out in the Evening

There was a time when Whitney and I kept tabs on movies—we'd read the season previews in all the magazines so we really knew what was coming, then wait impatiently for the opening nights of the ones that seemed most exciting. Many of these were small films featuring actors or directors we were already fond of—Big Night comes to mind as one that didn't disappoint.

Of course, these days—especially since we recently compounded our original offense against moviegoing by having a second child—we're lucky if we've even heard of most art-house films by the time they come out on DVD. I'm ashamed to admit that we rely almost entirely on big advertising budgets and Oscar nominations to tell us which of the movies we didn't see in theaters (i.e., pretty much all of them) should be in our Netflix queue.

Thankfully, we do still have a few friends who get to the movies regularly and bring the occasional film with neither of those things to our attention. One such is Starting Out in the Evening, which stars Frank Langella as Leonard Schiller, a once-celebrated novelist whose works have fallen out of print. Now aging and ailing, he wants simply to finish his last novel before he dies. Then he meets Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), a forceful young graduate student who plans to make his life's work the subject of her master's thesis, and has the loftier goal of starting a Schiller revival that will bring his books back into print.

Schiller has always shunned such attention in the past, but Wolfe's interest, which goes beyond the literary into idolatry, is irresistible to the old, lonely man. He agrees to a series of interviews discussing his work with her, during which Wolfe pushes both the conversation and their relationship into ever more personal areas. This puts a strain on Schiller's relationship with his only family—his daughter, Ariel (Lili Taylor), who is devoted to her father despite his having been somewhat inaccessible to her during her childhood.

Of course, a film like this lives and dies with its main character, and Langella, known to movie audiences mostly as a sinister character actor or villain, really shows his stuff here. He subtly portrays this emotionally closed-down yet still ego-driven man, conveying Schiller's vulnerability, fear, and excitement during his encounters with an assertive young woman who finds him—or at least her conception of him—fascinating. It's one of those low-key knockout performances.

Ambrose, who's been quietly proving herself lately as among the best in the business, is no slouch either. She more than holds her own in her many one-on-one scenes with Langella (no mean feat), always keeping you guessing, along with Schiller, as to precisely what her character is up to. The actress takes a type—the aggressive, obsessive, often obnoxious young academic—and fills it out beautifully, leaving the audience to veer between dislike of and sympathy for her character, sometimes both at once.

The rest of the cast, led by the brilliant, always underrated Taylor and Adrian Lester, upholds the standard set by the two leads. And while the screenplay, written by Fred Parnes and director Andrew Wagner (based on the novel by Brian Morton), does have a sort of stagey quality at times, and its initial tightness flags a bit near the end, overall it maintains a good pace in what is by nature a fairly slow-moving story.

Starting Out in the Evening is essentially Wagner's directorial debut (his one prior effort was a quasi-documentary that starred his own family), which I found frankly stunning. Some might argue that he rides mainly on the back of the remarkable cast, but I've seen many a small art film with a great cast that turned out dull, precious, or both. The director appears to have given his actors what they needed and then gotten out of their way. The result is impressive enough that I'm going to keep an eye out for Wagner's future work—even if his advertising budgets and Oscar-nomination tally don't increase significantly (though I wouldn't bet on that last part).