Starting Out in the Evening

Starting Out in the Evening (Andrew Wagner, 2007) - C

The first hour's annoyingly coy, predicated on our being in suspense about whether Lauren Ambrose and Frank Langella will have sex. The second is morose, almost pouty, and basically superfluous. The main problem is a weird circularity: we only get to know Ambrose's ambitious grad student in relation to Langella's aging writer (the film provides literally no details about her life that do not involve the writer or his books), and our only insight into the writer and his life comes from the grad student's bullshit literary analysis. There's also a second plot -- the writer's daughter trying to decide whether to subordinate her desire to have children to her desire to be with a man who doesn't want any -- that's supposed to crystallize Langella's personal and artistic crisis (he used to be a reckless idealist who wrote about liberation but was overcome by cynicism after his wife took his implicit advice and left him for another man) but just feels like piling on top of the already overt subtext. Pathological stodginess doesn't help -- this is a movie where a couple bickers over whether to see The Young Girls of Rochefort or The Battle of Algiers. I hope one of these characters gets a Raiders of the Lost Ark DVD for Christmas, or something.