Starting Out in the Evening (2007)

Coming of age stories can certainly be comforting, we’d all like to believe that a super lay or a chance meeting with someone older, established or famous (or a super lay with someone older, established or famous) will filter the confusion out of our lives and send us ready and willing toward whatever may be next. Coming of age pictures generally portray life as a light-switch that only requires a flicking from off to on, no wavering, nothing, when you’re on, you’re on, and everything’s a okay. The movies rarely acknowledge that our lives have a habit of going up and down, side to side, one day you’re winning, one day you’re losing, another day you’re winning again, another day you’re losing yet again. One day you’re over your young life crisis, while yet another day you find yourself racing straight into your mid-life crisis: drinking coffee and wondering why you watched all those coming of age movies. It has a disappointing third act, but The Graduate is a coming of age film that ends on a moving, and honestly unsettling note, sure, we’re here, but what the fuck now?

There’s all kinds of coming of age stories of course, the sexual experience with the older person, the infatuation with something (or someone) that (or who) turns out to be shit and representative of our childish delusions, the teacher who fights the system and imparts discipline in students everyone else has given up on, as well as the one about the strange, possibly sexually confused (if the genders are aligned correctly) relationship that can unexpectedly arise between an older, faded, past his prime writer and a young, precocious, energetic student who reveres the faded, past his prime writer. We know how these stories work: the student imparts a new sense of life to the teacher, while the teacher nurtures within the student a newfound discipline and sense of life’s fragility. I don’t remember much of Finding Forrester, but that was a recent example of this later type of coming of age picture. Wonder Boys would be another, but that was a wonderful movie because it had a sense of the genre’s necessities, and while it didn’t discard them, it admirably tweaked them and sent them scurrying in unexpectedly anarchic directions. Wonder Boys had a sense of humor, of play, and, most important, a sense of humanity.

Normally these pictures’ rigid devotion to formula causes them to forsake common sense. Starting Out in the Evening is the most joyless kind of formula picture, a self-conscious, self-righteous formula picture that knows the clichés, tries to transcend them, but has no idea what else to offer in place of the predictable pleasures. The director, Andrew Wagner, doesn’t supply the usual bombast, there’s no grand fight the system climax, and the conversations between the teacher/writer (Frank Langella) and the student (Lauren Ambrose) have a refreshingly true ring, they talk like two people who may have actually read a few books as opposed to watching movies about people who read books. This picture, no doubt, begins promisingly, but it’s dry and lifeless, and a subplot with the teacher’s daughter (Lili Taylor), meant to, in case we miss it, further highlight his self-absorption and emotional cowardice, goes nowhere; it’s dead weight in a picture that’s already perilously close to sinking. You may also find the film’s one note, pro-life, seize the day hammering exhausting, and perhaps even a little offensive.

Starting Out in the Evening is a failure of empathy as well as imagination, uncomfortably judgmental of its protagonist, the teacher, here called Leonard Schiller (the name is appropriate, pictures featured of Langella in his youth recall a young Leonard Cohen). The student, here called Heather Wolfe (more appropriate than the film apparently knows) repeatedly harangues Schiller for abandoning the passion of his earlier novels in favor of something colder, more considered and political. Schiller explains to Wolfe that those early books were written in one part of his life, the later books in another. That, God forbid, made sense to me.

We call it change, but these kinds of movies are usually only interested in promoting a change that leaves a thoughtless, shallow smile on your face as you leave the theatre, a true consideration of the ramifications of life’s choices is rarely on the menu. Later in the picture, the teacher’s daughter’s boyfriend (Adrian Lester) tells the daughter that he loves Schiller’s later work, it’s brilliant, “about something” (a sentiment that’s usually mocked as the height of deluded pretension in these kinds of pictures) and I perked up. Would Starting Out in the Evening dare imagine a scenario in which the young, green, bullying, faintly psychotic student isn’t armed with the most valid opinion? (Keep in mind the word opinion, the film doesn’t, her appraisal of Schiller’s work is to be accepted no questions asked, while everyone surrounding her, all older, all possibly more knowledgeable, are elitist fatheads. The girl’s own elitism, which she boasts of at one point, is never contested.) The answer is no, the Lester character is meant to be a jerk, another testament to Schiller’s head-up-his-own-assedness.

Starting Out in the Evening is well-performed, particularly by Langella, who brings an unsentimental humanity to his role that is quite endearing (he does wonders with the line “you’ve brought an old man some excitement”), and the final image (implying that change is something that, refreshingly, arrives bit by bit) works, but it’s not enough, the film is youth pandering claptrap, encouraging the newer generation’s (of which I’m a part) egotistical belief that they are of the most value, and that the old guys need to duck out of the way of their all encompassing brilliance. The picture is also probably critic pandering claptrap as well, one of those formula pictures dressed up in just enough literacy to be taken as “indy.” Don’t feel guilty if you find yourself bored watching Starting Out in the Evening, it is, in fact, boring.

★★

Posted on April 29th, 2008 in 2007, Reviews, Drama |

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