Leonard Schiller, the frustrated, forgotten 70-something novelist at the center of “Starting Out in the Evening,” symbolizes a dying era in Jewish letters.
Played with cultured reserve by the formidable Frank Langella, Leonard is closer in style and sensibility to Saul Bellow than to Norman Mailer.
Writer-director Andrew Wagner, who is in his mid-40s, knows that ethnic and literary terrain well. But it was his reverence for the solitude of writing that impelled him to adapt Brian Morton’s novel for the screen.
“It’s hard to say I identify with Leonard as a Jewish writer in today’s world,” Wagner explains. “My daily life is rooted more to a Buddhist tradition. My strongest personal pull to the book has to do with the journey of the artist over time through loneliness, through the questioning of our own lives and the world around us. How the artist must go out to see where the soul can’t be contained.”
Wagner is an earnest fellow, albeit with an easy laugh, and he chooses his words carefully during a leisurely Sunday afternoon chat at the Outdoor Art Club back in October, when he brought “Starting Out in the Evening” to the Mill Valley Film Festival. It befits someone who has been a writer since his undergrad days at Brown, and who strives to maintain an intellectual and spiritual existence amid the hedonism of his adopted city of Los Angeles.
“I’m probably more identified with the cultural aspects [of Judaism] than the traditional religious pinpoints,” he muses. “It was important to me that there was Jewishness in [Leonard’s] background because it kicked up feelings of familiarity with his world — the fact that he was a New Yorker from the Upper West Side, living only blocks from where I grew up. Because he was Jewish, I think I understood him on a cellular level. I could feel his life, even though he and I are from different generations.”
The staid, widowed Leonard is thrown for a loop in “Starting Out in the Evening” by an ambitious grad student (Lauren Ambrose of “Six Feet Under”) who wants to revive his legacy and short-circuit his writer’s block.
The screenplay acknowledges Schiller’s Jewishness, but to a lesser degree than Morton’s novel. Accordingly, Wagner and Langella never discussed Leonard’s Judaism in meetings or on the set.
“It’s a quiet, subtle shading that helps create a sense of history about the man,” Wagner explains. “Our goal was not to define Schiller through his Jewishness, but allow it to be a part of his makeup, so it just existed in the collective unconscious of the film. In the novel, his father was a rabbi and wanted Leonard to follow in his footsteps, and he broke his father’s heart by becoming a writer. It’s a different kind of spiritual path. It’s spirituality through creativity.”
“Starting Out in the Evening” is by turns contemplative and messy as it depicts the collision between Schiller’s rarefied pursuit of measured literary fiction and the emotionality of real life.
Familial messiness defined Wagner’s debut, “The Talent Given Us,” a semi-autobiographical, button-pushing film in which he cast his parents and sisters.
Wagner is a devotee of the “sacred writing room,” a trait he shares with Leonard Schiller. But he’s come to adopt a Zen attitude toward the collaborative nature of making movies.
“There’s a great deal of letting go when you get to the filmmaking process, and one of the things you let go of is satisfaction,” he confides. “The film takes on a life of its own, and you go through a process where you are trying to find a balance between your authorial control and the many forces that share space with your authorial vision.”
“Starting Out in the Evening” opens Dec. 14 at the Embarcadero Center Cinemas in San Francisco, the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, the Guild in Menlo Park and the Albany in Albany.