STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING

If Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Dangling Conversation” brings a tear to your eye, or if you own a copy of Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, this movie is for you. Starting Out in the Evening is based on a novel about a novelist who peaked in the waning days of the New York Jewish literary renaissance. Now pushing 70, Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) lives alone in an Upper West Side apartment lined with bookcases made of wood that glows in the evening light. Retired from teaching since a heart attack, he dresses in a jacket and tie every day to sit before his typewriter and peck away at the novel he’s been working on for more than a decade. It’s what keeps him going, even though he knows that the odds of getting it published if he finishes it are slim. Into this airless life comes Heather (Six Feet Under’s Lauren Ambrose), an ambitious graduate student who wants to make him the subject of her masters’ thesis. What ensues is not quite as predictable as it sounds, though I won’t deny that there is an aspect of May-December romance. Set in a mileu that no longer values what has come to be known as the “literary novel,” Starting Out in the Evening takes the practice of literature seriously, to the point of chiding Heather for enjoying Schiller’s novels for the wrong reasons. Triangulating this pair in unexpected ways is Lili Taylor as the heavily named Ariel, Schiller’s daughter, who has mortality issues of her own: A former dancer wondering what to do with her life as she hits 40, she wants a baby, even if none of the men in her life do. Langella’s performance is the centerpiece of the film: Bulky and slow-moving, he contrasts pointedly with our memories of his hunky youth (of which we are reminded at regular intervals by a photo that Heather nicks from his desk). He’s very much a dinosaur, a remnant of a lost era, like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman (or, for that matter, like Roth himself). But the character is drier than he really needed to be: age may have slowed his body, but surely there must be some lingering wit in there we don’t get to see. That evening glow that seems so warm in the early scenes of the film grows oppressive the more you realize that writer-director Andrew Wagner is utterly hypnotized by it.

—m. faust