The characters in director Andrew Wagner's new film Starting Out in the Evening, adapted from the Brian Morton novel of the same name, must embrace the fundamental truths/lessons about evolution and growth as Wagner did in making the film. The principal actors must ultimately be willing to risk the known for the unknown, to hold "surrender" as the guiding principle.
"Life is made more of questions than answers" acknowledges Andrew Wagner, of his film. Comparing his directorial process to living, Wagner reflects: "We must sacrifice and compromise. We have to hurt and be in the pain and let it be a form of nutrition and a source of growth—but not a source of perfection."
Starting Out in the Evening explores art, life, close relationships, and the luminous (and sometimes fragile) tendrils connecting them all. The film is set in Manhattan's upper west side, in small, compressed, intimate interiors, saturated with warmth. Frank Langella, ( Dracula ) impeccable as Leonard Schiller, is an aging writer who has spent the last 10 years in near solitude, laboring over his final literary contribution. His routine is disturbed, however, when Heather, played by Lauren Ambrose (HBO's Six Feet Under ), an ambitious graduate student writing about Schiller for her thesis, confuses her academic admiration with a personal interest. At the same time, Schiller's daughter Ariel, played by the radiant Lili Taylor ( I Shot Andy Warhol ), is confronting the actuality of being a single woman nearing 40 in the midst of unresolved dubious romantic relationships. "Characters who understand themselves through language must move beyond to where words don't reach; language has to be supplemented by a willingness to feel one's life," explains Wagner.
When Langella is asked whether his characters live with him after the film has been made, he responds: "From Leonard I take away a sharper understanding of the time wasted, hours wasted that I don't use creatively, intellectually, or emotionally or romantically—the hours we all waste in contemplativeness or fear or passivity. Leonard reminds me how foolish it is to live in the past or for the future… There is only this moment."
As suggested by the title, the characters are pushed by the very stuff of life, to re-examine, redefine, and reinvent themselves beyond self-perceptions and limited self-imposed constructs.
"Leonard learns for himself the very theme that he has been writing about all these years: Life is not designed for our comfort but for our struggle, and in the struggle there is growth," says Wagner. "There is more and more space within—to serve our art and the people we love. If we do the work we will find it. In opening himself anew to his daughter and his writing, Leonard Schiller, in the evening of his life, does the work; he starts out again."
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