Leonard Schiller is a truly tragic creature: a writer who has lost his voice. In Starting Out In The Evening, we meet his as a godly creature who reduces the composed, grad school chic biographer Heather Woolfe to a near puddle. But when we last see him, he has been broken and his swooning admirer has come to discover his embarrassing humanity, the kind of poor decision making and unoriginally ordinary struggles with old age and self-identity that would be unfit material for the masterworks of his own, once grand, literary career. Woolfe, an exceptional fan of the out of print writer who only really values his earlier work, wants desperately to use Schiller's personal life and published novels as the basis for her master's thesis. He declines, but rescinds when the brutal truth of his obscurity sinks in. It also does not hurt the situation that Heather intimated to him in her plea that a romantic connection is not entirely out of the question. Their mutually played game of passion, dismay and respect, as portrayed with incomparable candor by Frank Langella and Lauren Ambrose respectively, comprises the bulk of this refreshingly smart, small, and honest drama.Visually director Andrew Wagner gives us the best of both worlds by combining the close range intensity of digital camera work with the splendor of New York City nightscapes. He arrives at a happy medium between shaky, indie cam and big budget elegance. His film is both stunning and powerfully intimate with its characters and surroundings. New York is itself a strong character in the film, which uses many real locations in interesting ways.
But beyond the radiant images resides the beating pulse of literate but not precariously self-aware dialogue that is some of the best heard in any film of 07. The adapted screenplay by Fred Parnes is fiercely intelligent, filled with details - ranging from impressive literature tidbits to perfectly composed personal confessions - that demonstrate the conversational prowess of its many brazen characters without stumbling over its own brilliance, or theirs. It says what it needs to say, wonderfully and honestly without over-complicating or over-simplifying a single line. Langella humbly delivers lines such as "Freedom isn't the choice the world encourages. You have to wear a suit of armor to defend it." with all the precise world weariness that is needed to make it passionately believable but with none of the dramatic flourishes that would infer to you that it was a quote meant to be applauded or savored as brilliant.
This is the kind of little film that speaks its language so easily, you cease to worry about its direction or the quality of its creation and simply live it out until the end, when in equally humble fashion Langella shapes, in total silence, the future life of Leonard Schiller as though it were truly and unotably a part of the fabric of one man's journey toward something bigger, one small and unremarkable step at a time. God is truly in the details here, and the quick-witted, honest style the film takes on is blessedly never too cutesy clever or infatuously "real." It may be remembered as a minor gem, but its powers of crisp and insightful narration should not go overlooked.
Grade: A
