Starting Out in the Evening

I missed this film when it played at MIFF last year, but a friend urged me to see it – the plot, he insisted, was written for me. Indeed. Starting Out in the Evening’s protagonist is an ambitious young masters student who likens men her own age to chewing gum (ten minutes of flavour, followed by bland repetition) and longs to be another ‘Joan Didion, Joni Mitchell, or Joan of Arc’. !?! Oh dear. I’m really not that bad, am I?

Starting Out in the Evening is flawed, but enjoyable. Heather (Lauren Ambrose) is writing her thesis on Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), an ageing novelist whose books have been out of print for the past ten years. Schiller’s first book ‘Tenderness’ is a favourite of Heather’s, as she considers it the catalyst for her current pursuit of academic fame. Schiller is initially reluctant to help Heather find the thread that will hang her thesis together, but after a publisher friend tells him, ‘literary fiction is just so hard to sell these days’, he agrees to be interviewed. The interviews rapidly slide into button pushing matches, as Heather questions Schiller about the autobiographical elements of his work. After spending some time together, they kiss. That’s as far as their physical relationship goes – Leonard is far too aware of his rapidly decaying body to embark on a rampant affair with a fit young thing like Heather. A secondary story involves Schiller’s daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor) and her longing for both love and family, neither of which she seems able to find in the same man. Of course, the intersections are confounded by the past – Ariel’s relationship with the man she loves mirrors her relationship with her father, Heather is like a young Leonard, and the moral issues that inform Leonard’s books spill into the lives of the film’s characters.

The problem with all this is that although the characters lives, problems and motives are realistic, something about the film itself just doesn’t ring true. The plot points are perhaps a little structured, they feel contrived rather than organic, and cinematically, while it looks lovely, Starting Out in the Evening could just as well have been a short story. I couldn’t find any pressing visual/aural/thematic reason for this to be a film.

Despite this slight hollowness, I liked the characters and themes. Heather comes across as driven, pushy and ambivalent – her feelings toward Leonard flip between genuine respect and arrogant disdain. Her disappointment at the difference between Leonard’s writing and his reality is both personal and career-oriented. She wants to find the man she has imagined behind his words, and write a thesis that will simultaneously bring him back from the dead and further her own career. But I liked her – as I see it, her behaviour isn’t calculated, but happens because she feels unsure about following her own path. As she reveals early in the film, ‘Tenderness’ sparked her decision to leave her ‘very talented, very brilliant’ boyfriend in order to become very talented and very brilliant herself. Having made that choice, there’s an urgency in her desire to succeed. I’ve never been quite as decisive as Heather in making that split – I’ve always wanted both love and work – but at the same time I’m always worried that in trying to balance them I might end up with a mediocre version of both. Who knows, perhaps the idea that you have to sacrifice one thing for another is simply social conditioning, but on the other, it might be true that you can only be really good at one thing.

Starting Out in the Evening isn’t the life changing opus that Schiller’s ‘Tenderness’ is for Heather, but it made me think about stuff that I already think about some more. And for that, I’m glad.