Building a Hero To Tear Him Down
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Translating unspoken thoughts to the screen is a difficult task, one that Andrew Wagner’s new film, “Starting Out in the Evening,” attempts with the best of intentions. But like the thesis that is proffered at the end of the film, the glowing accolades that the filmmakers attempt to bestow on the novelist Brian Morton ultimately result in an undercooked product.
Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose) is a master’s candidate at Brown hoping to resuscitate the career of an aging novelist named Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) with her thesis. To get to the bottom of his work, she seeks out the author and begins to interview him about it. This results in some May/December flirtations and a stroke.
The interactions between the lithe graduate student and the aging writer are both unsettling and intriguing, but ultimately the film is unable to re-create the delicate balance of emotions that Mr. Morton created in his book of the same name.
The deference to Mr. Morton’s work is clear throughout the picture, but the interactions between the characters often fail to realize the soft sentiment that his novel achieved. Delicately balanced scenes from the book are repeatedly presented in off-kilter juxtapositions. Heather kisses Leonard’s hand on their first meeting; he covers her eyes. She paints honey on his face; he washes it off. Without Mr. Morton’s intricately laid guidance, these images become blind set pieces, fumbling in the dark.
The blame cannot be hung on Mr. Langella, who inhabits the soul of a man overlooked by history but convinced of the import in his work. Leonard, committed to his art, continues to write, knowing that he may never be read again. Mr. Langella’s performance is sure to draw attention. He deftly embodies the liberal idealist intellectual whose books are long out of print but who refuses to write for magazines because he has always believed that “art and commerce are at war.” Still mourning the loss of his wife, his failings as a husband and father, and the persistent embarrassments of the aging process, he goes against his more trenchant judgments to let this strange woman into his life.
Ms. Ambrose’s Heather is an odd mix of academic acquisitiveness and rampant sexuality. The former “Six Feet Under” star is a gifted actress, but her character is more sycophant than budding intellectual. She approaches Leonard with a sexuality that borders on perverse, seeming to be more interested in getting into the septuagenarian’s pants than his mind.
Once she convinces Leonard to help with her task, she confesses that she doesn’t like half of his four-book oeuvre. Drawn to the personal freedoms he allowed his female characters in his first two novels, she found his next two works detached and sterile. But her juvenile infatuation with women who make their own choices isn’t enough to bring a novelist back from the brink of obscurity, and when Leonard calls her thesis “half-baked” after reading it, his assessment rings true. More interesting is the film’s handling of Leonard’s daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor), a former dancer who teaches yoga (“what dancers do when they die”) and who subjugates her desire for children to be with a man (Adrian Lester) who will not entertain the option.
Ariel is the opposite of the freewheeling women who populate Leonard’s novels, an irony the film enjoys exploring. Ariel’s predicament as a woman worrying about her biological clock may not be new, but watching the dynamic between Heather’s deliberative pedant and the daughter who purposely resists intellectualism proves fertile. As Ariel struggles to find a comfortable place in the world amid individuals desperate to leave their marks on history, she becomes the most interesting character of the bunch.
But an intense fixation on old-school liberal intellectualism and ascetic artistry overwhelms some of the interesting on-screen equations, and an overall feeling of self-satisfaction is unshakeable from the final product. Short of doing justice to Mr. Morton’s novel, the film — like Heather — gets some credit just for the thought.
mkeane@nysun.com