Starting Out in the Evening
Directed by Andrew Wagner
Let me tell you about writers. Writers sit. Then, after a while, they stand. They pace. They sit again. Sometimes, they talk on the telephone. Or they surf the Internet. At some point, they generate words. They go over those words. Then they generate some more. They stand up. They sit down. I have just revealed to you the great secret life of the writer.
For some reason–perhaps because writers write them–people frequently make movies about writers. This is unwise. It’s one thing to write a book in which a writer is a character, since novels can venture inside a character’s head and back out again. In a movie, you have to watch a character do something. But writers don’t do anything. Therefore, moviemakers are always trying to figure out how to make writers do things.
It used to be that writers in movies would scribble something on a yellow legal pad, then read it over, make a disgusted noise, crumple the yellow paper in a ball, and toss it at a garbage can. The camera would then pan over to the garbage can, which was full of other sheets of balled-up yellow paper and was surrounded by other paper balls. This also might occur with a writer working on a typewriter, in which case he would pull the piece of paper out of the roller with a great flourish before crumpling it up.
After a while, it occurred to moviemakers that this was a cliché. So they tried other bits of action. In Julia, Jane Fonda plays Lillian Hellman. She is writing a play at a house on Martha’s Vineyard. She doesn’t like what she is writing. So she takes her typewriter and throws it out the window. Unfortunately, the real Lillian Hellman did not do such a thing, because even a Stalinist like Lillian Hellman would have known that if you throw a typewriter out the window, it will break. And then you won’t have the key “a,” which you need if (as Mary McCarthy said) every word you write is a lie, including “a.”
Lillian Hellman knew a lot of New York intellectuals. Now there is a movie about a New York intellectual in his seventies called Starting Out in the Evening. It is based on a very good novel by Brian Morton about a New York intellectual in his seventies, an elegiac and dryly witty portrait of a day long since past. The movie is serious, earnest, respectful, sober, and really, really terrible, as only movies about writers can be–especially if they’re movies about writers who are also intellectuals.
Frank Langella plays the intellectual. He has been widely praised for the detailed accuracy of his performance by people who have probably never met an intellectual. Langella’s character is a Jewish novelist named Leonard Schiller, who lives in a big Upper West Side apartment. Schiller is a very serious person and very dedicated to his novel-writing. He does not approve of magazines with advertising in them, because art and commerce are at war. He attends readings at the 92nd Street Y and says things like, “Her excerpt was read affectingly, I think.”
When a pretty graduate student expresses interest in writing a master’s thesis about his work, he refuses and says he does not approve of gossip and is far too busy being a novelist. New York intellectuals, you see, have far loftier goals in mind than writing for magazines with advertising in them (like, say, the New Yorker) or being the subject of master’s theses or having pretty young graduate students alone in their apartments with them.
You know Schiller is one of those old-time intellectuals because he does not speak in contractions. Also, he enunciates every consonant. These verbal tics are intended to make Schiller appear to be a literary highbrow. Schiller has Old World manners. He is courtly. He says, “Excuse me for just a moment” when he gets up to go to the bathroom. He purses his lips when the young graduate student asks him a personal question and says, “There is such a thing as decorum.”
All of these traits are intended to make him appear to be a highbrow. But this is not what highbrows are like, and it certainly isn’t what the New York intellectuals were like. Highbrows use plenty of contractions. New York intellectuals were often extremely ill-mannered, especially to young women. They did not run out of the room when a young woman smeared honey on their faces, as happens in a particularly risible scene here. They were just as likely to be the ones smearing the honey.
Langella isn’t playing a friend of Trilling and Howe and Wilson, as he claims. He’s more like the fussy and precise salesman at Brooks Brothers from whom they bought their suits.
And of course, Langella sits at an old Underwood typewriter, one of those heavy standing manual typewriters they stopped making in 1957, and bats away at the keys. This gives the cowriter/director Andrew Wagner his chance at that chestnut, the you-just-see-the-writer’s-eyes-and-forehead-as-he-stares-with-deep-concentration-at-the-page shot. It’s a mark of how unimaginative a filmmaker Wagner is that he shows it to us 37 times in the space of two hours.
That’s all well and good, but even New York intellectuals who hate ads in magazines use computers these days. Speaking of which, the computer may finally be the thing that kills off movies about writers. The only cliché anyone has been able to come up with so far for the writer-with-computer is the repeated use of the delete key. And that bit has gotten so old already that it makes you long for the good old crumpled-up piece of paper.
John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
