Starting Out in the Evening

Okay, I’m a sucker for this material and milieu, old-school writers and intellectuals in New York City, and I’ve read the Brian Morton novel on which this Andrew Wagner film is based, so I’m inclined to like it more than many would. I’m also partial to Lili Taylor, who is both wacky and luminous as the turning-40 daughter of the eminent elder writer played subtly and powerfully by Frank Langella, in a justly celebrated perfomance. Lauren Ambrose of Six Feet Under is a young grad student hoping not just to write her thesis on the writer, but to revive his career and bring his books back into print. She’s a striver and schemer (from Cleveland Heights!) trying to jumpstart her own career, but seems to have a genuine interest in reigniting the writer’s potency, perhaps at some risk to his aging heart. This was not a book I ever imagined reaching the screen, and the film is quiet and interior, but it emerges as one of the better movies about writers, a genre notorious for pretension and pratfall. (2007, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-78.)