'Starting Out' worth relishing

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

December 14, 2007

(A) Starting Out in the Evening is a rapturous, ruefully funny flight of sympathetic imagination. Featuring the first movie role for Frank Langella that ranks with his best stage parts, it's a rare kind of American movie. It gets us arguing about all the characters - and enjoying the debates every step of the way, because we're so intimately involved with their dreams and passions.

This movie tells the story of a young woman still thrashing out the shape of her life, who compels an aged man to look back without anger on his own experiences, including his complicated marriage and his fatherhood to a now 40-year-old daughter.

The heroine (or anti-heroine, or some combination of the two) is Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose, of Six Feet Under), a graduate student in literature who wants to make novelist Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) the subject of her master's thesis. Schiller is a Jewish New Yorker who resembles Bernard Malamud in his integrity and disdain for chic. Wolfe hopes to do for him what Malcolm Cowley did for William Faulkner: rediscover him as a great author and restore his books to print.

Schiller has recently had a heart attack. He wants to focus on finishing a novel and nudging his goodhearted daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor) into a happy family life of her own, even though her deepest love is for a handsome African-American intellectual named Casey (Adrian Lester) who doesn't share her need to have children.

But before long, Schiller responds to Wolfe's critical enthusiasm and personal infatuation. He recognizes that her study could revive interest in his fiction, and he senses her erotically charged hero-worship bringing spark into his life. Wolfe sees Schiller's theme as personal liberation (he's not so sure of that), and the movie is about staying open to change at every age. What makes it wonderfully ironic and complex is that the richest possibilities for Schiller and his family derive from their spontaneous rediscovery of the past. (The spontaneity comes courtesy of Wolfe.) Schiller renews his dedication to "the madness of art," a devotion to writing so pure that he'll only compose novels or teach, never scribble words for ad copy and easy money even at the invitation of a kind acquaintance. Ariel and Casey reconnect with lost hopes that once seemed contradictory. And Wolfe wins the spiritual knowledge that can't be earned with the awarding of degrees.

It's a four-character piece, but if measured by the size of its heart, Starting Out in the Evening is immense. Adapting Brian Morton's elegant novel of the same name, director Andrew Wagner, who co-wrote the film with Fred Parnes, creates a glistening universe. They deftly capture the exultation of literary creativity, and the life-denying sadness of it, too. The movie offers urban culture as high civilization: Schiller's jaunts to readings and recitals with Wolfe or Ariel convey how a city's cultural pastimes can capture its citizens' yearning for transcendence.

Schiller's relationship with Ariel is one of the few filmed depictions of father-daughter love that is as warm and overflowing with unspoken understanding as it is fraught with tension and concern. Ariel teaches Pilates, yoga and exercise - "that's where dancers go when they die," she says - and aims to master dance instruction as artistic therapy. Taylor plays her with a sometimes-skewed grace and a thrilling purity. She and British actor Lester, as Casey, are quietly combustible together; as he showed in Primary Colors (1998), he has a unique gift for portraying smart men with surprising pockets of obtuseness - and equally unexpected reservoirs of compassion.

But the movie rests on the astonishing footwork of Langella and Ambrose, who invest each interchange between student and mentor with vitality and nuance. As Schiller slips into revealing forms of intimacy with Wolfe, Langella pulls off an extraordinary challenge: He depicts a character acting against his better judgment and never quite relinquishing mixed feelings, despite spurts of joy and expectation. Langella's mixture of sensitivity and mental toughness imbues Schiller with tragicomic depth rather than pathos. And Ambrose's ability to combine Wolfe's ambition and ardor into a sustained, irresistible spout of longing makes you feel that anything is possible in their relationship.

Early on, Schiller and Ariel listen to an author at New York's 92nd Street Y express a vision of a man's "consciousness, his being" attached to his body "only by glowing threads of light." Langella's performance and Wagner's moviemaking are so inspired that they turn Schiller's consciousness inside out and make those threads of light visible. Here, the life of the mind, the body and the soul achieve an unnerving and finally uplifting unity.

>>> Starting Out in the Evening (Roadside Productions) Starring Frank Langella, Lauren Ambrose, Lili Taylor, Adrian Lester. Directed by Andrew Wagner. PG-13. 110 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com