Starting Out in the Evening (2007)

Premise: A graduate student (Lauren Ambrose) seeks out a reclusive, out of print author (Frank Langella) as the subject of her master's thesis, while his daughter (Lili Taylor) seeks out an ex-boyfriend (Adrian Lester) recently returned to New York.

Would that this movie had come out here before I wrote my Top 10. There's a large extent to which this movie is about the cruelty of having to grow old, so I briefly considered comparing it to the recently viewed The Savages. That would have been wrong. It would do the movie an injustice. Instead it's closer spiritual cousin is found in Once. Fred Parnes and Andrew Wagner's screenplay, from Brian Morton's novel and directed by Wagner, is as much about artistic creativity as John Carney's beautiful picture. It shows artistic creativity as it comes out the other side: deadened, perhaps lost, an ember awaiting a bellows.

Who is Langella? Where has he been hiding? I've been watching him in movies for years, but now I'm seeing him: his brown eyes, his blue lips. He's a giant, and he's adept at using his physiognomy against himself when needs be. It's a performance that requires a closed man to open himself for reasons you that would seem to be the opposite of those intended, and Langella carries it of so gracefully.

Ambrose has recently reminded me that I like her even if I didn't go in for that show she used to be on. There's genuine passion in her voice when she talks about Schiller's characters, an unmistakable literary love. You can hear the subtle differences in the way she talks about them and the way she talks about everything else. Her voice is rich with subtext even when her character isn't.

I can never get enough of Taylor, and now I feel like I'll never be able to get enough of Taylor and Lester together. Ariel's honest in a way that kills me because she's caring and she's also self-reflexive. As for Lester, he should be doing Shakespeare every day of his life. And complaining about people glowing at him. Every movie couple should be so luck as to have such natural intimacy and chemistry.

What a gloriously literary movie. I could say nothing better about it than it makes me wish I could read the (non-existent) books discussed therein. A+