A fighter pilot with chiseled-face good looks flying his F-18 into harrowing situations with hair raising rolls and banks. A muscle-shirt wearing dancer twirling his drop-dead gorgeous partner across a dance floor in front of an awed crowd. A superhero who only existed in the brightly inked pages of comic books, now in 3-D on the big screen, diving from a skyscraper to battle a villain in a metropolis' gritty streets. An old man with health issues living alone, wearing a coat and tie inside his own apartment, going to bed at 9 o'clock.
Wait, what? Yep, that's Starting Out in the Evening—a movie for the rest of us.
* * *
Seventy-year-old novelist Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) has written two acclaimed novels (and two not-so-acclaimed novels) but has fallen into obscurity over the years. Graduate student Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose) plans to write her Master's thesis on Leonard and also hopes to inspire a revival of interest in his books. Heather asks Leonard if he will consent to interviews, but he refuses, saying his health is poor and he is trying to complete what will likely be his last novel. However, realizing his career is fading away, and this young grad student may just be his ticket out of obscurity, he changes his mind and agrees to weekly interviews to give Heather the material she needs for her thesis.
Leonard's daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor) sees the new life being breathed into her father by this ambitious grad student. However, one early morning Ariel pays an unannounced visit to her father and sees a pair of women's boots on the floor of her father's apartment. Embarrassed and angered, she quickly leaves and becomes suspicious of Heather's motives. Ariel is 40 years old, and hears her own biological clock ticking. She wants to have children and stops using birth control without telling her boyfriend. She had left her previous boyfriend Casey (Adrian Lester) over his unwillingness to have children, but now reconsiders and tries to restart their relationship. Her father doesn't approve of it.
Each of these characters in Starting Out in the Evening has their own needs and desires, but they unselfishly interact with each other, learning from each other the importance of sharing life. For people who like a meaty intellectual story, there is much here to enjoy. No less than Roger Ebert said that Langella's performance was Oscar worthy. That the Oscars ignored it only confirms that movies of the mind and emotional depth play second fiddle to movies of entertaining merriment.
Hugh Blanton is the author of A Home to Crouch In. He has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, KNOT Magazine and other places. He can be reached on Twitter @HughBlanton5.
