Starting Out in the Evening
Director: Andrew Wagner
Year Released: 2007
Rating: 1.0
Dusty codger (Frank Langella) who has spent ten years writing his newest novel but can't finish it has his life meddled with by a social climbing graduate student (Lauren Ambrose) who wants to write her thesis on his books. Not only does the dialogue thud and the Ambrose-Langella romance fail to convince even in the slightest (it's a sign of how self-conscious this drivel is that when Ambrose wipes jelly on Langella's face neither he nor she laughed but the audience I saw this with certainly did), but the subplot involving Langella's baby-mad daughter (Lili Taylor) and her estranged boyfriend (Adrian Lester) functions mainly as a metaphor for the two sides of Langella's literary career: Taylor represents his (early) romantic side, Lester his emotionally hardened side. I'm sorry, but if we're on a date and you want to see The Young Girls of Rochefort instead of the masterful Battle of Algiers, that will be the last date we ever go on (I'll even be polite about it - when we go in different theaters I'll be sure to say, "It's not me, it's you"). When it comes to literary recluses, I'm a Forrester man, myself: punch the keys!
