Reel Politique: Movie Review, Starting Out in the Evening, King of California, The Savages
Apparently Hollywood believes that since we are going to be depressed visiting our families over the holidays anyway, we are likely to aggravate the sore by seeing somber movies about dysfunctional families. Three are available on the big screen right now. Starting Out in the Evening concerns a novelist in the twilight of his career; King of California concerns a failed jazz musician turned madman cared for by his daughter; and The Savages dissects a brother and sister whose aged and estranged father suddenly needs care. All three are made by C- or B-list directors with a couple of small movies (or fewer) in their past.
Starting Out in the Evening is directed by Andrew Wagner, who made a quasi-documentary called The Talent Given Us that sounds a lot like Little Miss Sunshine. It’s adapted from a novel by Brian Morton and shows how an elderly and near-forgotten Henry Roth-style novelist named Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella, who displays his aged tackle again just as he did in Lolita), one of those New York Intellectual types, has his life disrupted and then replenished by a Brown University student, Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), doing a Master’s thesis on his work, which entails the unusual task of tracking down the novelist and pestering him with questions. Starting Out in the Evening, shot without dire evidence on HD over the course of 18 days, offers up the Manhattan of Woody Allen’s movies, all rust colored evenings and quiet book lined apartments. Schiller is blocked and out of date while Heather is an opportunist always with an eye out for the main chance. She’s always in seduction mode, seductively taking off her sweater or kicking off her boots to make a late breakfast. But it’s when she starts “dressing” him that things get weird; one night in his kitchen she mysteriously starts to rub honey on his face (maybe it makes sense in the source novel). Langella establishes one of those affect-less performances that European films proffer, but the best observed parts of the movie are Heather’s pretentious way of talking about books, a lingo and manner of speaking painfully familiar to those who have spent too much time around those playing at being literateurs. Also good is Jessica Hecht as a Village Voice book review editor whom Heather cultivates, a role that captures the sense of constant insinuating challenge that defines conversation amongst the types portrayed in the film. Lili Taylor as Schiller’s baby-hankering daughter is actually cute in the film. Starting Out in the Evening ends the way Atonement begins, with a typewriter clacking into the airwaves.
King of California is written and directed by newcomer Mike Cahill and on the level of the script suffers from some of the sins of ambitious amateur screenplays, including a passive central character, a quirky quest, and not enough story for its running time. Nevertheless, high profile talent was lured to the project in the form of Michael Douglas as Charlie, just released from Bedlam, and Evan Rachel Wood as his high school age daughter Miranda, who has been getting on just fine on her own these past years, thank you very much, working and driving her own car and living in splendid isolation under the radar of child services. Once Charlie is out, however, he gradually unveils a scheme to find buried Spanish gold hidden, it turns out, under a Costco. Increasingly implicated in the hunt for gold, Miranda gets a job at the Costco so she can case the joint and eventually steal the keys for the night when Charlie intends to prove his claim, drawing upon the tools in supply at the store itself, including diving equipment, it being decided by the film’s creators that there be an underground lake hidden under the Costco for Charlie to eventually and mystically disappear into. This is one of those movies in which characters are called upon to exhibit the same emotion over and over (exasperation in Miranda’s case, or manic determination in Charlie’s) until … they’re not. The grim realism of the film’s first 80 minutes is then undermined by the magical realism of the last 10 as we are invited to rejoice in the fact that, gosh darn it, some times people’s dreams are downright noble, no matter how crazy.
The Savages is the first feature film by Tamara Jenkins since indie favorite Slums of Beverly Hills back in 1998 (does it really take independent filmmakers a decade to fund movies these days?). It concerns Wendy (Laura Linney), a failed playwright), her brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a mediocre academic with a specialty in Brecht, who over a holiday have to fetch their father (Philip Bosco) from his retirement community in Arizona, where he has descended into dementia, and set him up closer to Jon’s home, in Buffalo. The movie will be too real for some viewers’ taste as it relays the bureaucratic minutia of an old person’s final days and its effect on estranged children. Neither Wendy nor Jon are likable, both being chronic liars of convenience, self-absorbed, self-destructive, But like Starting Out in the Evening it’s a muted, grimly plain movie, flashing only one real argument scene and shot in settings designed to remind us of America’s ignored industrial ugliness. Unintentional or not (and true or not) the film’s final message appears to be that we can only be free to be you and me once our parents are dead, as the film concludes on an optimistic note of achievement for the two losers. The Savages may only eat their own but the diet proves oddly beneficial.