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>> Frank Langella shines as an aging
novelist in Starting Out in the Evening

by MATTHEW HAYS

Frank Langella is an actor I’ve always had issues with, largely because he was once in a relationship with Whoopi Goldberg. Ms. Goldberg would go on TV talk shows and chat about her sex life with Langella. The circus-freak porn images this conjured up were rather horrifying. The monster of Frankenwhoopi never really escaped my mind.

But Langella deserves the accolades he’s getting for his latest film, Starting Out in the Evening. Langella plays an aging fiction writer who was once celebrated among the New York literati but whose glory days are clearly over. He lives in a charming Manhattan flat, and has a warm but occasionally strained relationship with his daughter (played magnificently by Lili Taylor). Langella has been struggling to finish his latest novel for a decade.

Enter Lauren Ambrose, who portrays a spunky, young Brown University student who wants to do her Masters thesis on Langella and his body of work. He agrees, and this means that the impressionable, star-struck young aspiring writer is allowed to ask any and all manner of probing questions about Langella’s life, how he got to be the person he is and the interconnections between his fiction and his personal reality.

Directed and co-written by Andrew Wagner, Starting Out in the Evening is a refreshing film for many reasons. A brilliant cast is matched by an intelligent screenplay and directorial hand; thank god, this feature is devoid of the kind of sentimentality that so often accompanies the aging process in the movies. The relationship between Langella and Ambrose is far too complex to be rosy, and her preoccupation with him and her interrogation is at times intentionally irritating. As well, Taylor is given some screen time to develop her character, a 39-year-old who grapples with her yearning to have a child, despite the long-term relationships she’s had with men who don’t want to start a family.

More than competent screenwriting, Starting Out in the Evening is an extremely realistic depiction of a writer who, approaching the end of his career and life, must take stock of the whole thing—including those unavoidable faults. It’s not always comfortable, but that’s precisely the point.

Starting Out in the Evening
opens this Friday, Jan. 18

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