Starting Out In The Evening

Adapted from Brian Morton’s novel of the same name by director Andrew Wagner and co-writer Fred Parnes, Starting Out In The Evening is a thoughtful drama, its theatre-like, carefully wrought dialogue brought to life by fine performances from its ensemble cast.

The main story concerns the relationship between Heather (Lauren Ambrose), an ambitious graduate student in her mid-twenties and Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), a reclusive New York novelist in his seventies. His four published novels are all out of print and he’s been working on his next one for ten years. Heather is writing a critical biography for her master’s thesis and is determined to re-kindly interest in a writer (and by extension man) she idolizes. A secondary storyline concerns Schiller’s daughter, Ariel (Lili Taylor), a dancer-turned-pilates instructor whose biological clock is ticking loudly but whose lover, Casey (Adrian Lester) is not prepared to oblige.

No doubt the core of the film’s success is Morton’s measured, articulate novel but it is also a source of the film’s talkiness and its highly constrained, self-conscious tone that at times seems more mid- than high-brow. Heather is writing a thesis about a man who is writing a novel and what there is of a plot moves between bookshops, book readings (Spike Lee’s sister Joie, does one of the reading) and literary soirées while the characters agonize over their lives and relationships in a very Manhattan kind of way. Indeed it is not unfair to say that Starting Out In The Evening is Woody Allen without the jokes, albeit Allen at his best.

It’s familiar stuff that ultimately rests upon the ability of the actors to make the characters feel real which they do so marvellously. Langella gives a compelling performance as the defensively reserved, writer but Ambrose matches him every step of the way as Heather probes for chinks in his armour that, to mix metaphors mercilessly, will become feathers in her cap Taylor, in a softer role than we usually see her, is particularly good as the devoted daughter who can’t get past her father’s career-obsessed neglect of her. Rounding out the ensemble Casey is less developed than the other three, the issue of his own failings as a parent having been, somewhat oddly, omitted from the screenplay-

Starting Out In The Evening (the title refers to an unpublished early novel by Leonard which is not actually mentioned in the film) is a skilfully-crafted, thoughtful film for the literary minded.

 

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