drama directed
by : Andrew Wagner featuring
: Frank Langella - Lili Taylor - Lauren Ambrose - Adrian Lester -
Karl Bury running
time : 1 hour 44 minutes
Frank Langella (Dracula,
Good Night, and Good Luck.) stars in Andrew Wagner's independent drama
Starting Out in the Evening, an adaptation of the acclaimed 1999 best-seller
by Brian Morton. Langella plays Leonard Schiller, a once-celebrated author
whose first four novels inspired Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose) to pursue
a career as a writer. These days, Leonard is still working toward completion
of the novel that has occupied his life for nearly a decade. On the surface,
Leonard has removed himself completely from the deep-seated need for success
that characterized his life at an earlier point in time; but on a more
buried level, he still longs for his fiction to be rediscovered and re-acclaimed.
Now an eager graduate student in the throes of her thesis, Heather is writing
her dissertation on Schiller, and promptly convinces him that she can use
the thesis to regenerate popularity and discovery of his work. Heather
also projects personal interest in Leonard, however, which cuts straight
through to the core of his loneliness and brings him in touch with his
need for a meaningful relationship even as it leaves him feeling shaken
and increasingly uncertain. Meanwhile, Leonard finds that his relationship
with his daughter, Ariel (Lili Taylor), is challenged, both by Heather's
presence and by Ariel's decision to begin dating her former boyfriend Casey
(Adrian Lester) once again -- a fact that Leonard finds most upsetting
thanks to his disapproval of Casey. Suddenly, Leonard feels his entire
world turned upside down, from his familial relationships to the security
of his writing to his own physical vitality -- but he is also taking risks
and plunging headfirst into the core of life for the first time, thus living
out the principles long celebrated and upheld in his fiction and giving
himself the capacity to grow.
