Starting Out in the Evening

Quote of the day:
“Never knock on Death's door: ring the bell and run away! Death really hates that!”
--Matt Frewer

“Starting Out in the Evening” is like a very good play. There are just four characters, and almost all the action happens in one location. The plot is minimal.

It’s a character study. I say this because the movie has been criticized a bit for both its premise and its story.

Don’t skip the movie because of that criticism. You’ll miss one of the great performances of 2007. Frank Langella is excellent.

He plays an aging novelist who composes on a manual typewriter. He lives in New York, has been quite successful and is a classic literary intellectual.

Modernity crashes into him in the form of a graduate student who wants to write her thesis on his work. Lauren Ambrose from “Six Feet Under” plays the graduate student. Some critics have said her portrayal is too ditzy to make her believable as a young literary type.

I disagree. Appearances and behavior can be deceiving these days. You could say that this is part of the old/new collision that is this movie’s heart.

Her daughter (played by Lili Taylor) is part of this collision in a different way. She and her boyfriend fight for respectability in her father’s eyes. They come from a generation that views responsibility and relationships very differently.

What makes “Starting Out in the Evening” work so well is how it makes clear the compromises built into both the “old” and the “new.”

We learn, in a very eloquent way, the cost of closed-in privacy from the “old,” and the ultimate cost of easy betrayal from the “new.”

Frank Langella will be nominated for a best-acting Oscar. His performance is reason enough to see this film.

This movie has left theatres, but will be coming out on DVD soon.