IT really doesn’t get much better than Frank Langella’s career-capping per formance as a once-famous novelist in Andrew Wagner’s chamber drama “Starting Out in the Evening.”
Langella’s Leonard Schiller has spent the last decade fruitlessly trying to coax his latest novel out of the typewriter. His four earlier books – the first two of them acclaimed in the 1950s – are out of print.
For Leonard, frail and recovering from a heart attack, time and opportunity seem to be running out.
He rambles around in a vast Upper West Side apartment he used to share with his long-dead wife and his daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor), a pilates instructor pushing 40. He clings to a carefully structured routine and is so buttoned-up he wears a tie to eat breakfast.
Leonard’s life is upended by the arrival of the aptly named Heather Wolf (Lauren Ambrose), a graduate student who not only wants to do her thesis on Leonard, but vows to restore him to the public eye.
He demurs, but Leonard can’t long resist the ambitious Heather’s flattery and, perhaps, the possibility of a May-December fling with a woman practically young enough to be his daughter’s daughter.
The real daughter, meanwhile, is stuck in issues of her own. Ariel yearns for motherhood but may be yearning even more for the boyfriend (Adrian Lester) she broke up with five years earlier.
In the hands of Wagner, who adapted a novel by Brian Morton with Fred Parnes, what sounds like well-traveled territory with stock situations turns out to be briskly affecting.
Langella, who has aged magnificently from the flamboyant star of “Dracula” (1979) into the minimalist William Paley of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” finds subtle shadings of regret in Leonard.
The character’s secrets are peeled away by Heather, and Ambrose – the red-headed wonder of “Six Feet Under” – is one of very few actresses in her age group who could hold her own with Langella in her first high-profile screen role.
Taylor also makes an impressive comeback as the conflicted daughter who instinctively distrusts Heather, but “Starting Out in the Evening” is first and foremost a triumph by Frank Langella.
STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING
Running time: 111 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sexuality, profanity, brief nudity). At the Paris and the Sunshine.