susidee34's Full Review: Starting Out in the Evening
Starting Out in the Evening is poignant as well as dramatic, full of the flaws and inconsistencies of human nature. This is a completely character driven movie, based around the life of aging author/retired professor Leonard Schiller. His books long out of print, he was, for a time, a noted author. Now the reading world has gone the way of the cinematic world - more bang for your buck. No one shows much interest in the type of work he developed, a more casual and introspective, even personal, style of writing.
He is in the tenth year of his “next great novel” but seems at a stalemate. His life has gone fairly stale as well, burrowing away in his seedy apartment, stuffed with memories and old books. He has a daughter, Ariel, who longed to be a dancer. Approaching 40, she is now a Pilates instructor with her own stumbling blocks. She is involved with a man, decent enough, that she really doesn’t care for but she aches for a child. She, apparently from what was suggested, had been pregnant in the past, by her one love Casey, but had gotten rid of the child. Casey, not wishing to be tied down with children convinced her to do this, then moved away to Chicago.
Now Casey is back in New York and her desire rears its' ugly head again. At the same time, Leonard, who morosely faces that blank page everyday, has a resurgence of energy in his life as well. A young graduate student, Heather Wolfe, has decided to make Leonard and his work the basis of her thesis and it is her goal to ingratiate herself into Leonard’s life and learn the depths of his soul, which she believes is the ground for his earlier work.
Leonard, practically a recluse, has no interest in allowing her inside his world but relents with her persistence. What evolves is the basis for the entire movie, both between Leonard and Heather and Ariel, Casey, and her father. It’s a highly personal look inside the heart of an ailing and aging writer and his muse.
What I particularly liked about the movie was the fact that it gave us Leonard with all his warts and beauty. It didn’t glorify the life of a writer but instead gave us a more personal insight to the world that is moving on while some of the participants remain vaguely still. It is filled with moments of tender mercy and simmering rage, which only comes to head for one spare moment.
The characters are simplistic and believable. Frank Langella as Leonard Schiller draws you into his part with his small nuances. Gentle at times, almost to a fault, he embodies the spirit of one who has lived past the time when the world was a place he believed in and now must adapt to his failing health and dependency on others. His aspirations to complete this novel, which has overshadowed his life for ten years, seems almost surrealistic.
Several times, in scenes with Heather, you get an almost sexual attraction which is enhanced by Heather’s ethereal and spiritual nature. She is, certainly, intelligent and gifted, yet she exudes an animal magnetism which comes off of her in waves, perhaps because she is so unaware of it or perhaps because she is completely aware of what she is doing. Leonard breathes this in and absorbs it, giving a spark back into his otherwise plodding life.
Heather, played wonderfully by Lauren Ambrose, gives a professional yet playful air to her part. I have always found her to be a strange actress, going back to her bizarre character on Six Feet Under, but I think she met her stride head on in this movie. By allowing her SFU kooky character to show a bit, she also has brought the maturity that has naturally progressed in her life.
The side story of Ariel and Casey was interesting, of course, but added little to the base story except to ground the character of Leonard even further. Ariel and Casey were played by Lili Taylor and Adrian Lester. While I found Ariel to be almost as ungrounded and flighty as her name applies, I thought Casey a more concrete character. I particularly liked the personal scene between he and Leonard when he helped bathe Leonard. [I will admit I was surprised this received a PG-13 rating since we not only saw Langella’s naked butt but also his twig - I guess since the berries weren’t exposed it skated by]
Overall I think director Andrew Wagner and writers Brian Morton and Fred Parnes delivered a well rounded piece and deserved the 8 nominations and 2 awards they received for this piece. Like I mentioned, rating was PG-13 for sexual content, language, brief nudity. There was especially one tender scene between Leonard and Heather, completely sexual, where they didn’t touch at all.
Almost the entire movie is composed of the interiors of two apartments in New York. One aging, like its’ owner, stuffed with musty novels and heavy furniture; the other, cluttered and unkempt, like its’ inhabitants.
DVD extras include commentary, scene selection, subtitles - all nothing great.
This is really a hidden gem of a movie that warrants more than one viewing to gather all the small nuances together.
Battling illness and unable to finish a novel that has taken him ten years to write, aging novelist Leonard Schiller is slipping into literary obscuri...More at HotMovieSale.com
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