DVD Review: Starting Out in the Evening

Directed by Andrew Wagner
Starring Frank Langella, Lauren Ambrose, Lili Taylor
2007

Seized with nostalgia for my days as an English Lit major, I put Starting Out in the Evening on my Netflix list last week. Frank Langella (Superman Returns, The Ninth Gate) plays Leonard Schiller, an octogenarian novelist struggling to finish his latest book when a beautiful grad student (Lauren Ambrose of bit parts on random tv shows fame) suddenly appears to interview him for her thesis/revive his career. Unfortunately, the film had a completely different effect than I had hoped for; rather than making me yearn for those days when I thought a career in literature would be a Utopian existence, I came away convinced that everyone associated with academia is a complete fuck.

Starting Out in the Evening creates a world where having four out of print novels and a modest teaching career is enough to finance a lifetime in a swank Manhattan apartment building with a doorman and a marble foyer. Being a cranky old author also gives you license to have weird, grandfatherly sex with any grad student whose life was changed when she read your book (bonus points if that grad student only wears designer evening wear). Also, in case you were worried about your legacy, everyone remotely associated with you (like your daughter's on again off again boyfriend) will periodically reread your books and remind you how much they respect and admire you. Despite not publishing in decades, you also still get invited to numerous literary events and parties where you can schmooze with other intellectuals, show off your new arm candy, and compare the contents of their floor to ceiling bookcases with your own. Authors can even have major strokes with no lingering side effects except needing to nap more frequently and when your grad student mistress finishes her thesis you'll still be fit enough to tell her off and give her a good slap for wasting your valuable time.

There's no denying Langella delivers a strong performance as Leonard Schiller but he's hardly a sympathetic character (although the frontal nudity was a bold play for vulnerability points) and Lauren Ambrose's tenacious student is scarcely more likeable. Whether she's pressing Schiller to admit the influence of D.H. Lawrence in his work or accusing a hip East Village journalist of going soft on Lou Reed, she comes across as completely insufferable. Their on screen chemistry is almost non-existent and by the end of the film I was bored to indifference, hardly caring that she learns a valuable lesson about life (what I'm not exactly sure) and that he discovers it's never too late to start over again. Unless you have a soft spot for passionless spring/winter romances, you can probably skip this one.