Starting Out in the Evening (2007)
Average Rating: 7.3/10
Reviews Counted: 98
Fresh: 84 | Rotten: 14
Starting Out in the Evening features sharp dialogue and moving performances from the talented Frank Langella and Lili Taylor.
Average Rating: 7.4/10
Critic Reviews: 38
Fresh: 30 | Rotten: 8
Starting Out in the Evening features sharp dialogue and moving performances from the talented Frank Langella and Lili Taylor.
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Average Rating: 3.6/5
User Ratings: 3,341
My Rating
Movie Info
Frank Langella (Dracula, Good Night, and Good Luck.) stars in Andrew Wagner's independent drama Starting Out in the Evening, an adaptation of the acclaimed 1999 best-seller by Brian Morton. Langella plays Leonard Schiller, a once-celebrated author whose first four novels inspired Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose) to pursue a career as a writer. These days, Leonard is still working toward completion of the novel that has occupied his life for nearly a decade. On the surface, Leonard has removed
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Cast
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Frank Langella
Leonard Schiller -
Lauren Ambrose
Heather Wolfe -
Lili Taylor
Ariel Schiller -
Adrian Lester
Casey Davis -
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All Critics (103) | Top Critics (39) | Fresh (88) | Rotten (14) | DVD (7)
Starting Out in the Evening is thrilling in a way that a movie larded with car chases and explosions can seldom be, because of the way it deals with that basic building block of civilization, the creative process.
Langella's nuanced performance saves the film; the actor has an understated but powerful role, and he takes full advantage.
It's Langella's performance that anchors the film.
What to do with this light, while it lasts? [Director] Wagner's problem is to find an answer to that question and also to offer some resolution to the conflicts of honesty and compromise the movie portrays.
A strong cast and a literate script make for a refreshingly subtle film.
Langella is superb, and Starting Out in the Evening is a classy film... but it could have used a little less circumspection, a little more juice.
An ageing literary lion rages at the dying of the light
ut when all is finally revealed it’s gesture—especially the hands—that lifts this film into the ranks of extraordinary and ... bears repeated viewings to savour the subtlety and intimate sense of self.
Starting Out in the Evening has a formidable performance by Frank Langella to recommend it.
A bravura performance from Frank Langella blended into a lackluster story.
Awkward and sometimes overly subtle, but compelling performances by a cast of normally supporting actors who make the most of their much deserved chance to carry a film.
The sophomore feature from director Andrew Wagner is a marvelous, nuanced work with rich characters and complicated relationships...
Wagner has turned the page on a promising career, and it will be exciting to see what the next chapter brings.
Criminally overlooked, this is a great movie, about which I could find no complaint or overt flaw except feeling that Taylor (whom I do love) was mostly a distraction. See it if you can.
Wagner's film is an elegy of sorts for that once-mighty beast known as the New York Writer, a creature that now finds itself increasingly marginalized in a world in which readers are getting scarcer and shelf space for serious fiction is dwindling daily.
Audience Reviews for Starting Out in the Evening
Super Reviewer
Frank Langella is phenomenal in the lead role of this tightly constructed and intelligently written drama. He lets us know Leonard Schiller in little gestures like his reflexive withdraw from Heather's kiss on his hand and some of his more impulsive actions in the third act. The character's deep pain comes through Langella's reserved exterior, and the script gives us subtle moments like his prodding of Casey about "compromise." Lauren Ambrose is almost up to the task of keeping up with Langella, but it's Lili Taylor who truly rises to the challenge as this father/daughter relationship is one of the most believable I've seen on screen in a while.
The film's theme focuses on what we give up to remain sane in our relationships -- all our relationships, with each other, with our work, with our hopes for the future -- and how time is the constant antagonist.
I thought the film's pace slowed down in the second act, and Schiller's attraction to Heather was never fully clear. Is this a sexual relationship in the fullest sense of the word, or is it intellectual with occasional sexual trappings? And why does Heather react as she does in the third act?
Overall, this film is worth seeing for Langella and for the opportunity to see an intelligent film about intelligent people, which is a rarity in this age.
Super Reviewer
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Top Critic
This is all fascinating stuff, and since it is embodied in yet another wonderful performance by Frank Langella, you'd think that this would be a sure fire hit. Unfortunately the script veers into a very unsatisfactory second theme involving the uneven acting of Lili Taylor as Langella's 40 year old daughter, who hears her biological clock chiming midnight.
I suppose that this secondary theme shows the effects of father on daughter and juxtaposes life versus the escapism Langella has perfected, but really, I feel that all things are thusly connected and in this case the secondary story line detracts rather than augments - kind of like a very weak Greek Chorus in its attempts to bring the core drama more into focus.
Essentially the main story (the one worth watching) deals with a grad student (capably portrayed by Lauren Ambrose) who is writing her thesis on Langella, a former literary giant in the twilight of his career. His early scribbles led to a cathartic experience for Ambrose, who now reveres the ground the "great man" walks on - which adds an odd, yet somehow compelling bit of Lolita and a May/December romance that makes Langella begin to question everything, including the characters and plot ark of the novel he has been working on for 10 years.
There are some great truths here, and Langella is superb - totally raw beneath the veneer of his intellectual civility; and yet, somehow the entire enterprise seemed derailed by the daughters' tale. It was almost like watching two different films on two screens. One held a pretty tight narrative, with some wonderful insight, that seemed very organic, while the other was full of overly obvious setups and some badly delivered, preachy dialog.
At the film's close you simply see a man at his typewriter - starting over on an enterprise he knows he will probably never finish - and yet, since the act of writing defines who and what he is, he follows that instinct, just as a salmon will return to its spawning ground - whether he has anything new to say at this juncture is left to speculation - but regardless, write he must.