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Starting Out in the Evening
EMAILPRINTRoadside Attractions
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 33 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 17 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by:
Fred Parness
Andrew Wagner
Directed by: Andrew Wagner
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 23, 2007
DVD: April 22, 2008
Running Time: 111 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for sexual content, language and brief nudity
Starring Frank Langella, Lauren Ambrose, Lili Taylor, Karl Bury, Anitha Gandhi, Sean T. Krishnan, Jessica Hecht, and Adrian Lester
All that remains for Leonard Schiller is his work. His one enduring goal in life is to finish the novel whose completion has eluded him for ten years. With his earlier books out of print, he has learned to starve himself of the desire for the success he was once so close to, though beneath this practice lies a pull for his work to be rediscovered. Schiller’s main contact to the world is through his daughter, Ariel, with whom he has settled into an amiable relationship, though he must hide his disappointment that at 39 she remains befuddled by life, still looking for love and a father for a longed-for child. Schiller’s world is shaken when Heather Wolfe, a smart, ambitious graduate student, convinces him that she can use her thesis on his work to bring him back into the literary world spotlight. (Roadside Attractions)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: The Talent Given Us
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
New York Magazine David Edelstein
Above all is Langella, achingly vulnerable under layers of flesh. In one scene, alone, he eats peanut butter intensely, thoughtfully, and nothing he could do as Hamlet would seem deeper or more poetic.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Intelligent, involving and conspicuously adult, Starting Out in the Evening is almost shocking in its distinctiveness, its ability to create high drama from an unlikely source.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter James Greenberg
Succeeds so beautifully because of a compelling story, great acting, intelligent writing and sensitive direction.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The movie is carefully modulated to draw us deeper and deeper into the situation, and uses no contrived plot devices to superimpose plot jolts on what is, after all, a story involving four civilized people who are only trying, each in a different way, to find happiness.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
A rapturous, ruefully funny flight of sympathetic imagination. Featuring the first movie role for Frank Langella that ranks with his best stage parts, it's a rare kind of American movie.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Andrew Wagner has made a lovely comedy of death and rebirth.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
What is so remarkable about Mr. Langella is that he seems to hold Leonard’s intellectual cosmos inside him, to make it implicit in the man’s every gesture and pause.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
It's rare to see a movie adaptation in which a filmmaker has taken so much care in translating the odd little qualities that make a particular novel special, to preserve the complex and fragile threads of feeling between characters that are often much easier to grasp on the page.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Whether this reserved, hypercautious widower can deal with the arousal she creates in him - let alone be physically able to act on it - is one of the many layers of tension that drive this unusual and absolutely riveting dance.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
We are slowly and mightily drawn into this intimate story, which is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally moving.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Director Andrew Wagner, adapting a novel by Brian Morton, is sometimes understated to a fault, but his work with the actors, who also include Lili Taylor as Leonard's daughter, is impeccable.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Rick Kisonak
Movies about writers are almost always romanticized affairs but Starting Out in the Evening is the rare exception. It is at once an elegy for the vanishing generation of Bellow, Cheever, Mailer and Updike and a dead on indictment of our culture’s current state.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
Langella is superb, and Starting Out in the Evening is a classy film.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
Like most of this refreshingly subtle film, it's not what you expect, and it's not something you've seen before.
Read Full Review >Variety Scott Foundas
Director Andrew Wagner draws topnotch work from a pro cast in Starting Out in the Evening, a wise, carefully observed chamber drama.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Ella Taylor
This wise, observant, and exquisitely tacit chamber piece complicates every May-December, academic-novel cliché in the book.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Langella delivers a master class in acting. He's playing Leonard Schiller, an aging author aching from the loss of his wife, a weak heart and literary neglect.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
It's a gentle, unhurried drama about how people can connect with each other through conversation, nonverbal gestures, and writing.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
Taylor also makes an impressive comeback as the conflicted daughter who instinctively distrusts Heather, but Starting Out in the Evening is first and foremost a triumph by Frank Langella.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Jessica Reaves
Because the characters are richly realized and their dialogue rings true, we stick around, rooting for something like a happy ending.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
If the film has a weakness, it's an ending that's so vague and open to interpretation that it's not at all clear how director Andrew Wagner ultimately wants us to feel about these self-absorbed characters and their precious literary concerns. But the performances carry the day.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
It never commits the sin of sentimentalizing old age, as Hollywood usually does when it deigns to admit that people over 55 exist.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
This is a human-sized drama about people with contradictory motives, trying to help or use each other.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Fact is, Starting Out is pretty dry stuff as a movie, even as it's enlivened by vivid acting.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
A "small" movie. But in its keenly observed examination of strangers who become intimates - and of family members who remain, in part, strangers - it has big things to say.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Part of Morton's achievement is to present all four people through the viewpoints of the other three; Wagner can't do that, but the performances are so nuanced that the characters remain multilayered, and they're not the sort of people we're accustomed to finding in commercial films.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
It's also and most interestingly about the writing process itself, a difficult feat to pull off on film, which Wagner and co-screenwriter Fred Parnes manage to display with unvarnished realism.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Connie Ogle
Taylor is effective as a woman struggling to take control of her life, but Ambrose's work feels shallow in comparison.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
A gentle collection of scenes that work and scenes that don't.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
Intelligently acted but oddly stagnant adaptation of Brian Morton's acclaimed novel.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
Starting Out never builds to the explosive climax it seems to be heading for, which I suppose is a good thing for its overall integrity, but maybe not so good for its motion-picture value.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
Wagner and company fail to follow Langella's primary rule of storytelling: "Follow the characters around until they do something interesting."
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Wallows in bleakness and settles for sentimental gestures.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 8.0 (out of 10) based on 17 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Chad S. gave it an8:
In Noam Bambauch's "The Squid and the Whale", Walt Berkman(Jesse Eisenberg) corrects his younger brother on a New York sidewalk, when Frank(Owen Kline) talks about the "magazine" that published their mother's short story. As if the smaller Berkman gives a flying f***, the bigger Berkman with the bigger brain, informs his tennis buff bro that their mother's short story came out in a "literary journal". Owen is a philistine. And later in the film, a self-proclaimed one. Ariel Schiller(Lili Taylor) is a philistine, too. Much to her father's silent chagrin, she doesn't speak his language. Heather(Lauren Ambrose) is working on a thesis, not a "book", that examines the out-of-print novels of a forgotten writer, novelist Leonard Schiller(Frank Langella). Ariel might be a yoga instructor, but she's older and wiser than Owen. Knowing full-well what was expected of a writer's daughter(named after Sylvia Plath's first book of poems), maybe Ariel purposely misspoke, to underscore Leonard's lost invitation to the pantheon of literary greats. Books are written about his contemporaries. But he's no Saul Bellow("The Adventures of Augie March"). Apparently, he wasn't much of a father either, at one time. Vestiges from this rocky past can be gleaned by the omission of an "I", when both father and daughter say they love each other("Love you," not "I love you."). In "The Squid and the Whale", we're witnesses to the storm. How children can drown in the vortex of their writer/father's megalomania. In "Starting Out in the Evening", we see the calm that comes after. More or less, Ariel survived. She's single and motherless, but far from being human wreckage. When Leonard finally relents, and admits to Heather, that his own life experiences do indeed inform his novels, its from a viewpoint of objectivity. "Starting Out in the Evening" is objective, too. Since there are no flashbacks to the earlier incarnation of this absentee dad, Leonard survives our scrutiny, our close reading, and doesn't come off as a tyrant.
Jay H. gave it a6:
I am surprised the ratings on this are so high. It's not a bad film but it sure is not an exciting one and I was bored with it at times. Finely acted though and it's a good quality film.
Mason P. gave it a1:
Awful, awful movie. Bad writing, bad editing, bad score, bad casting (at least in the female roles). The characters (other than Frank Langella) simply aren't believable as literary intellectuals--especially Lauren Ambrose. The writing certainly doesn't help. The same awkward scenes played over and over--reminded me of an episode of General Hospital (with a young, handsome doctor replaced by a 70 year-old writer) on repeat.
Harry L. gave it a10:
Jane S., I've been waiting years to say this but "Jane, you ignorant slut" you have no idea what the difference is between romance, sex and attraction. This was a marvelous work where, by the way, English and English majors, are treated with dignity, integrity and respect.
Joan gave it a10:
If Frank Langella isn't nominated for an Oscar for his performance in this film, then no one should be nominated. A beautifully cast and directed film...full of "real" NYC location shots and a sensitively portrayed character study of relationships. I loved it.
Nancy O. gave it an8:
Excellent and nuanced performance by Frank Langella. Lauren Ambrose was also great as the mainpulative, would-be seductress. Lili Taylor as the conflicted and weaker character of the daughter displayed the intelligence and ambiguity one would expect. Really interesting film.
Jane S. gave it a0:
I saw this because Ebert said it was for anyone who loved writing and literature. i didn't sign up to see a 25 year old Alice in wonderland kid have sex with a 65 year old dotard. disgusting from a young woman's point of view if you ask me. i nearly died. Ii hated this film, and it doesn't portray English majors favorably at all, or writers for that matter.
