STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING

by Kevin Koehler

I'm sure Andrew Wagner, director and co-writer of Starting Out in the Evening, is a nice person.  No animals were harmed in the filming of his motion picture.  It's not an ugly film, or a cynical film, or a sadistic film.  Andrew Wagner, by all appearances, means well.  Not that I've ever met him socially.  He could very well be Hitler.  I guess what I'm saying is that Andrew Wagner shouldn't take it personally that I dislike his movie with such passion.  It has been accepted to a number of film festivals.  Prestigious ones, like Sundance and Toronto.  Plenty of people do like Andrew's film, quite more than don't, so there is great solace in that.  I am just a man.

Frank Langella, a very fine actor, plays aging novelist Leonard Schiller, a guy who's been successful enough at writing that he lives in a sizable Manhattan apartment and doesn't have to lower himself to writing ad copy (though he did teach literature for a while).  However, the New York literary establishment views him as having blown his proverbial creative wad before turning 45.  His new book, one he hopes to finish soon, does not have a publisher.  No one in the industry even seems willing to read it, their plates full reading real books - the kind that sell (ie: celebrity confessions and self-help pap).  They give him backhanded compliments like "I respect you too much to blow smoke" and "literary novels are such a tough sell."

No one cares except Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose).  Twenty-five-year-old graduate of Ivy League university with red-hair and slim figure Heather.  She thinks Leonard Schiller is a forgotten genius, even if he did peak before 45, and it's about time people rediscovered him, damn it.  Heather also finds him sexy (or is at least willing to look past his unsexiness for the sake of literary/academic insight) and is not afraid to show it by smearing honey on his face.  It reminds one of the character she played on the HBO series Six Feet Under, only more pretentious and annoying.

There's also some shit about Leonard's daughter, yoga instructor Ariel (Lili Taylor); the extended plot diversion doesn't have anything to do with anything, but it's in the movie so let's talk about it.  Ariel wants to have a baby but her boyfriend (Adrian Lester) does not.  They love each other, but sometimes love is not enough, such as (in one central sequence) when one person loves The Battle of Algiers and the other The Young Girls of Rochefort (whose very mention in Wagner's film suggests an epigonic association).  There are gaps that simply cannot be bridged and this, apparently, is one of them.  Ariel does not like Heather and questions her motives and/or aptitude in literary criticism.  Leonard reassures his daughter that Heather graduated from Brown (just like Andrew Wagner, coincidentally) and thus there is no reason to doubt her competency.  "Do you have any idea how much hard work and how much discipline that takes?"

In Starting Out in the Evening, people talk a lot.  About themselves, what's on their minds, their hopes and dreams, what authors they like, their emotions.  If you are unclear about how a character is feeling at any one particular moment, just wait a few seconds - they will tell you.  They'll do it while walking the streets of Manhattan, sitting in a Manhattan restaurant, browsing in a Manhattan bookstore, and so on around the block in their claustrophobic universe that seems to consist solely of (a) the incestuous New York literary circle and (b) their own navels.  When they're not talking, they're calling their ex-boyfriends on the phone only to hang up when someone answers.  It's all so fucking masturbatory, honestly; these people are not that interesting and worse, only vaguely humanesque.  We know nothing of Heather besides her own literary ambitions, grating personality, and that she thinks rubbing condiments on old men is erotic.  It's not - it's absurd, and Leonard's ultimate acquiescence to her silly sexual entreaties makes me feel even worse for him than the grad student sleeping with the seventy-year-old man because she likes a book he wrote.

Interesting footnote: Frank Langella gained wide acclaim early in his career playing Count Dracula in the Broadway production of Bram Stoker's Victorian tale (stage design by renowned writer/artist Edward Gorey), for which the actor earned a Tony nomination.  He would reprise his role in John Badham's 1979 film adaptation, the director's follow-up to his smash Saturday Night Fever (with Sir Laurence Olivier notably co-staring as Van Helsing).  The critical reaction was decidedly mixed, though Langella's performance (which emphasized the vampire's eroticism) was widely praised.

© Pretentious Musings. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.