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'Starting Out in the Evening'

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BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

November 23, 2007

Andrew Wagner knows the world of the Upper West Side Jewish intelligentsia from the inside. In the vivacious comedy "The Talent Given Us," he related the road trip of a New York City family with photo-realistic precision, its effect magnified by the cunning deployment of his own father, mother and sister as his actors.

Whether he can achieve the same measure of credibility with non-familial characters is called into question by "Starting Out in the Evening," a painstakingly earnest literary-world drama that stars Frank Langella as Leonard Schiller, a university professor and out-of-print novelist who is nearing the end of his tether without the recognition enjoyed by a Philip Roth or Saul Bellow.

Schiller copes with his lack of success by disengaging emotionally, a self-protective mechanism that is challenged when a graduate student named Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose) violates his cocooned existence to write a thesis on his work. While the tenacious Heather angles her way toward the ultimate intimacy with her subject, the widowed Schiller tangles with his 40-year-old daughter (Lili Taylor) over her seemingly dead-end relationship with an old flame (Adrian Lester).

"Starting Out in the Evening" has the patina of authenticity: there are the readings at the 92nd Street Y, the cocktail parties, the snarky literary agents. But Wagner's characters speak in banalities that describe their all-too-familiar plights from the outside without getting inside their skins, as if they are trapped in the expositional stages of an old Broadway play. (The sentimental music score doesn't help matters.) Langella's inner turmoil is so palpable you can almost reach out an touch it; he's so repressed and suggestible to the obvious manipulations of Heather, however, that you can't help but wonder how he's managed to interact with students all these years.

STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING (PG-13). Frank Langella, fresh from his Broadway coup as Richard Nixon, gives a searing impersonation of an emotionally disengaged novelist who is rattled by the attentions of an enamored but critical graduate student (Lauren Ambrose). Andrew Wagner's attempts to vivify the New York City literary world are at odds with the flat dialogue. 1:51 (sexual content, language, brief nudity). At the Paris Theater and Landmark's Sunshine, Manhattan; coming soon to Huntington's Cinema Arts Center.