Product Details

• Actors: Frank Langella, Lili Taylor, Jessica Hecht, Lauren Ambrose, Adrian Lester
• Directors: Andrew Wagner
• Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: Lions Gate
• DVD Release Date: April 22, 2008
• Run Time: 111 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0013AVNOS
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #23,954 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
It's a familiar story: Pretty young thing shakes up silver-haired recluse. With the recent exception of Venus, however, most such efforts fall flat. In adapting Brian Morton's novel, Andrew Wagner treads well-worn ground, but avoids most pitfalls of the genre. It helps that his theatrically trained cast sidesteps cliché in their finely calibrated performances (including Jessica Hecht as a savvy magazine editor). He also refuses to exploit his female protagonist. Heather Wolfe (Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose) is confident and intelligent, but she's neither sociopath nor muse. The grad student approaches New York novelist Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella in a deceptively subtle turn) about interviewing him for her thesis, but he declines. He's working on his fifth book--the first four are out-of-print--and doesn't have time to spare. She flirts and cajoles until Leonard starts to yield. It's an open question whether the author is charmed more by her admiration or her good looks. There's shading in Heather's methods, too, since she has difficulty distinguishing the man from the myth. Leonard's daughter, Ariel (Lili Taylor), is concerned their relationship is unhealthy, while he feels the same about her rekindled romance with former flame Casey (Adrian Lester). She wants to have children, he doesn't, and Leonard doesn't want to see her get hurt again. In the end, each charts their own course, resulting in a hopeful--if hard-won--conclusion. Written over two years and shot in 18 days, Starting Out in the Evening puts most big-budget literary dramas to shame. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Product Description
Battling illness and unable to finish a novel that has taken him ten years to write, aging novelist Leonard Schiller is slipping into literary obscurity. Formerly a famous author, Schiller has been all but forgotten by the readers, colleagues and critics who once praised him. But when Heather Wolfe, an ambitious graduate student, convinces Schiller that her thesis could reintroduce his writing to the world, the reclusive writer is forced to confront his past regrets. Frank Langella delivers a career-capping performance as a man who must redefine his work - and his perceptions - in the twilight of his life.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

130 of 131 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 'The madness of art', April 27, 2008

By	Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING is a quietly moving work of art, a film adapted from Brian Morton's novel by screenwriters Fred Parnes and and Andrew Wagner (who also directs) that dares to take us to the wall with decisions we make about how we conduct our lives and negotiate the changes that can either be stumbling blocks or stimuli for creative awareness, It has much to say about the creative process of writing, a theme upon which it first appears to be based, but it more importantly urges us to examine how we live - how we make use of this moment of time in which we inhabit a body in the universe.

Leonard Schiller (in an extraordinarily understated performance by Frank Langella) is an aging author, a man whose first two novels seem to set the literary world on fire, but whose next two novels languished on the shelves and slipped into the same plane of obscurity Schiller finds his life since the death of his wife. He has a daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor in another richly hued performance) who is nearing age forty and is unable to bond permanently with a man because of her obsession with having children before her biological clock ticks past fertility. Into their lives comes Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), a bright young graduate student who has elected to write her master's thesis on the works of Leonard Schiller. Schiller is absorbed in writing what may be his last novel and can't be bothered with Heather's plea for a series of interviews. But curiosity intervenes and soon Heather and Leonard are involved in the process of interviewing, a process which gradually builds into overtones of Heather's physical as well as intellectual attraction to Leonard. Meanwhile Ariel observes the process that seems to be infusing life into her father and encourages her to exit her current relationship with Victor (Michael Cumpsty) and re-connect with the true love of her life Casey (Adrian Lester), a man she loves but who refuses to give her the children she so desperately wants. The manner in which these characters interact and learn from each other the importance of sharing Life instead of obsessing with selfish goals brings the drama to a rather open-ended close, another factor that makes this story significantly better than most themes of May-December romance and unilateral coping with self-centered directions.

The pleasures of this film are many, but among the finest is the quality of acting by Langella, Taylor, Ambrose, and Lester. In many ways the story is a parallax of views of life as art that subtly intertwine like a fine string quartet. Why this film was ignored by the Oscars only suggests that movies for the mind take second place to movies for the merriment of entertainment. For people who enjoy the challenge of a meaty story, this film is a must. Grady Harp, April 08

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Flawed Gem, December 21, 2007

By	Glenn R. Urbanas (Richmond Hill, New York USA) - See all my reviews

Let me state at the outset that this review concerns the theatrical release only. I have not read the book nor read any of the reviews for it. I caught this film just before it disappeared after a brief run at my local art cinema. Frank Langella deserves an Oscar nomination for his supremely restrained portrayal of a buttoned-up recluse, an emotionally remote retired professor and novelist, who has been working for years on what may well be his final novel, if he can ever finish it. It is not the first time this great actor has played a writer - for a spectacular contrast see his performance as the womanizing solipsist in `Diary of a Mad Housewife.' Here he is seduced by a flirtatiously manipulative grad student (Lauren Ambrose) into allowing her to enter his largely solitary life for the purpose of a series of increasingly pointed interviews that will help her complete the ambitious thesis she is writing about his work. So great is her apparent admiration for her `sad knight' that one wonders whether she is totally sincere, or deluding herself about him, as he may indeed be about both himself and her. But she is so flattering, intelligent, and attractive, and he is so kindly generous, that he cannot manage to oppose her when she persists. The ingredients at this point would make for a pretty good drama. However, the film suffers because, as happens with so many film dramas, too heavy-handed a final edit has reduced the main story to a series of vignettes interspersed with scenes from a largely irrelevant subsidiary plot concerning Schiller's unmarried, childless, daughter (Lili Taylor), who on the eve of her fortieth birthday, unhappy with her dull lawyer boyfriend because he does not want her to have a child by him, re-encounters an old flame (Adrian Lester) with whom she had broken up five years before over the same circumstance. The fact that her old love is black is not remarked by anyone as a problem, reflecting either the liberality of the subjects, or the presumed liberality of the audience. This rather clichéd and uninteresting sub-plot gets in the way of furthering the development of the relationship between the principals, as Heather attempts, with her combination of bookish intelligence, earnestness, and sexual provocations (whether inadvertent or deliberate we are not permitted to know), to unravel the mystery of why the stubbornly proud, and hopelessly idealistic professor, whose work is largely forgotten by a publishing world more oriented to pop culture than artistic endeavor, who refuses its offers of commercial largesse, has failed to produce anything quite as brilliant as his first two books. Something happened and we do not know what. Scenes appear to have been cut between Heather and her editor acquaintance and between Ms Schiller and her lover that might have further elucidated the mystery, that embodied by the principal characters, with their differing motives, and the budding signs of romance between them. Scenes must have been jettisoned for the sake of getting the film in well under two hours, or for the sake of maintaining the distracting sub-plot, and whether this occurred because of some perceived need to maintain the contours of the book, or a lack of inspiration at the heart of the story, is immaterial. Deserved praise is due Frank Langella for a brave, and very restrained performance along with co-star Ms. Ambrose. Regret for the deficiencies of an irrelevant and annoying sub-plot that might have been better employed to further the mystery of the tragic dilemma at the heart of the creation of art, or any great endeavor, that to continue, to succeed, a certain stubborn, dogged courage, a selfish recklessness about oneself and others, of their feelings and opinions, seems to be required.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, April 26, 2008

By	Ira David Socol - See all my reviews

This superb film really should have taken home Oscars - perhaps as many as three, for Frank Langella's brilliant lead performance, Lili Taylor's turn as the daughter, and certainly the screenplay by Fred Parnes and Andrew Wagner which discovered all the soul of Brian Morton's novel while losing only the page-count building 'for English-professors-only' references and complications.

Starting Out in the Evening is a 'small' story. The heroics are minimal, the scale completely personal, and yet on film this is never small or dull. Langella towers over the New York that has forgotten him, that has moved past a time when intellectual and creative power meant more than money. As his turning-40 daughter Taylor struggles with the battles of her own generation - hunting for both meaning and family, while Lauren Ambrose's Heather Wolfe carries the city of today into their realm, selfish and self-obsessed, consumed with the ideas of personality and fame.

It is a delicious triangle with much to say about the stages of life, the progress of American culture, and the power of creativity. But none of it is ever shouted. The script by Parnes and Wagner, along with Wagner's perfect directorial balance, and lighting and cinematography which establishes a fully-realized city and time, does not preach, it simply brings the viewer in to these three lives and trusts that we will understand.

Near perfect. Watch it. Starting Out in the Evening will be one of the best cinematic evenings of your year.