STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING sss DIRECTED BY ANDREW WAGNER WRITTEN BY FRED PARNES AND WAGNER WITH FRANK LANGELLA, LILI TAYLOR, LAUREN AMBROSE, AND ADRIAN LESTER
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I also saw Starting Out in the Evening—adapted from Brian Morton’s novel by Wagner and cowriter Fred Parnes—in mid-July. It’s finally opening this week. Much of the film’s novelty derives from its characters, the sort one almost never finds in “commercial” films—both flawed and sympathetic—and it keeps them vivid, ambiguous, and three-dimensional throughout. Heather (Lauren Ambrose) is a feisty, impulsive grad student in her mid-20s writing her master’s thesis on Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), a Jewish New York novelist in his 70s whose four published novels are all out of print. Heather says Schiller’s first two novels helped her to claim her own personal freedom and tries to convince him that she might be able to bring his works back into circulation. Despite enormous differences in age and temperament, the two develop an uncertain but increasingly intimate relationship.
Meanwhile, Schiller’s devoted daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor), a dancer turned aerobics instructor, is pushing 40 and longs to have a child. After an unexpected encounter with her former boyfriend, Casey (Adrian Lester), they uneasily resume their relationship. Casey, a black academic now helping to launch a new leftist magazine, has a son from a former marriage and is determined not to have any more offspring. Their mutual affection is palpable, but they remain at loggerheads about this issue.
Do we deem Schiller and his daughter both failures, as they’re often prone to view themselves, or as successes in certain ways they don’t recognize, corresponding to the ways Heather views Schiller’s first two novels and Casey views Ariel’s lack of inhibition? Does the aggressive manner in which both Heather and Casey pursue their careers and intellectual interests make them more or less self-centered than Schiller and/or his daughter, and more or less likely than them to succeed?
