"Starting Out In The Evening" starts out in the daytime as graduate student Heather Wolfe (played by Lauren Ambrose) meets aged novelist Leonard Schiller (played by Frank Langella) in a Manhattan diner. Waiting for him she looks at a novel of his called The Lost City. Pay attention to this scene in Andrew Wagner’s film version of Brian Morton’s novel. It sets up her first deception.
She tells him that she wants to do a dissertation on his work and hopes that will spark a revival of interest in his novels. He is slowly working on his first novel in decades and recently suffered a heart attack. He dismisses her interest.
Schiller is a widower and spends much free time with his daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor), nearing 40 and desperate to have a child.
In a bookstore, he reads her article on another writer and decides to work with her.
This movie is a story of intellectual and sexual seduction. The allure of the flesh is perhaps matched by the allure of intellectual interest, but simple attention may suffice.
I had a rush of nostalgia with the look of the film. Much of the movie takes place in Schiller’s upper West Side Manhattan apartment. I haven’t been in one of those pre-World War II apartments for years. They are greatly desired for their high ceilings and relatively spacious rooms. I remembered so well their dingy corridors outside the nice apartment.
By contrast, you see the bohemian apartment of the East Village and the glossy yuppie restaurant-bar. Schiller is a relic of a lost age of an intellectual literary scene in New York.
Wolfe mentions to him the impact his two early novels had on her life, assisting her in making her own choices to live her own life.
His later novels were connected to social issues.
To mark its fiftieth anniversary, I recently read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Kerouac shows the downside of living your life for kicks, especially for women as they get older and have children.
Schiller’s daughter Ariel never quite found herself professionally and is still in love or infatuated with the exciting writer Casey over the bourgeois lawyer Victor.
I would assume that Leonard is Jewish and Heather probably as well. But never is such a thing mentioned. Why? Would it load too many associations on the movie? Was it so obvious to the director that it wasn’t noticed? This is a drama about the sort of milieu that Woody Allen used to make comedies about before he started to apparently hate comedies.
The direction and acting were very high caliber.
"Starting Out In The Evening" embraces a romantic view of literature as a heroic adventure. Watching it is an elegiac adventure of a world disappearing before my eyes.
(About the author: Richard Cooper is a Columbia College graduate where he majored in European intellectual history).
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