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Oscar Watch
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Falling Out in the Morning
Though Frank Langella was given the same kind of sentimental favorite chance as Best Supporting Actor nominee Hal Holbrook, the star of Starting Out in the Evening will have to wait until next year for possible Oscar recognition.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 12:20 PM
By Brent Simon
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Roadside Attractions
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A performance of immense subtlety
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Back in 1970, Frank Langella had the distinction of being nominated alongside Joe Namath as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s choice of Most Promising Newcomer – Male. While that trophy was eventually claimed by James Earl Jones, it was thought that this might be the year that Frank Langella would garner his first Oscar nomination, as Best Actor, for his towering performance in Starting Out in the Evening.
Alas, it was not meant to be. Langella’s Oscar evening plans were finalized this week — or at least defined by the absence of more specific plans — when his richly drawn, artfully understated lead turn in director and co-writer Andrew Wagner’s Starting Out in the Evening failed to score that Best Actor nod.
Langella’s wild card slot appears to have been claimed instead by Tommy Lee Jones, who has this year’s surprising category nomination for In the Valley of Elah, a miniscule art house release ($6.7 million take, domestically) whose time had come and gone earlier in the fall. Then again, Langella may never really have had a chance, as indie distributor Roadside Attractions failed to punch through either at the box office — where it’s grossed only $600,000 to date — or with a string of critics prizes that might have caught the attention of enough Academy members.
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Warner Independent
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As William Paley in Good Night and Good Luck
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Langella was awarded the Best Actor prize from the Boston Film Critics Society and crowned the runner-up to There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Day-Lewis by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, but otherwise this awards season he found himself on the outside looking in, done in by fickle big city art house audiences whose indifference played a part in making sure that the film never saw an expanded release much beyond several dozen theaters.
Still, much like Naomi Watts’ critically lauded but Academy-unrecognized turn in Mulholland Drive, Starting Out in the Evening could be the profile-raising film that lays the groundwork for a Langella Oscar nomination in the near future. In the case of Watts, an exhilarating fresh face, it was 21 Grams, from 2003; with savvy, respected veteran Langella, the possibility looms at around this same time next year, courtesy of his wrapped performance as Richard Nixon in Ron Howard’s adaptation of Frost/Nixon, a role for which the actor has already won a Tony Award on Broadway. Either way, Langella - who also appeared recently as CBS President William Paley in George Clooney’s Oscar-nominated Good Night, and Good Luck. - is clearly enjoying a mini-renaissance.
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Universal Pictures
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A good early handicapping bet for the Best Actor of 2008 race
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In Starting Out in the Evening, he portrays emotionally shuttered novelist Leonard Schiller, a once famous New York writer whose books have long been out-of-print. Having suffered a heart attack the previous year, Leonard is now given to small, pedestrian rituals like movie-night get-togethers with his adult daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor), and pecking away, quietly and with no expectation or demand, at a novel he’s been working on for more than a decade.
Leonard’s staid routine and preconceived notions get shaken up when Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), an ambitious grad student defined by a hunger for self-definition, enters his life. Leonard’s early novels had an electrifying impact on Heather, and she now wants to use her thesis project to spur a rediscovery of his work. The pair enters into a series of challenging interview sessions, and Leonard’s respectful tolerance for Heather slowly melts into consideration, then an unlikely, if still mannered, friendship.
Starting Out in the Evening ably fits all the clichés of being a labor of love rather than an act of commerce. “If you read what I read, and get the scripts most actors get,” Langella explains to FilmStew during a recent one-on-one interview, “when you get a script like this, you very much want to meet the man who wrote it, because it’s so literate and intelligent, and the aim is very much unlike the present-day aim of most films.”
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Roadside Attractions
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Starting Out co-star Lauren Ambrose
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Made on a shoestring budget in only 18 days, the production further conforms to preconceptions about an all-for-one-and-one-for-all shoot; Langella even recounts one time the film’s producer personally picked him up because the single production assistant’s car broke down on the highway. “I pulled clothes from thrift shops,” he remembers. “I changed clothes in the back of men’s bathrooms in restaurants, and even ran home to my apartment to change clothes.”
Langella, who turned 70 earlier this month, comes across as intelligent and exceedingly well spoken, and radiates a calm rootedness that comes from total self-assurance — a surprisingly rare quality in a lot of young actors. Quickly, though, one gets a sense of what might be his most valuable professional attribute - an unerring eye for detail, and how that extrapolates forward in character.
Complimenting the size and length of a reporter’s hands and fingers, Langella notes, “Oh, you could play way past the eighth octave,” before eventually confessing that he just learned to play the piano for a scene in Frost/Nixon. Of the experience, he says, simply and with a wide smile, “It was thrilling to learn something new.”
Langella explains he’s by nature fairly private, since work on films is so collaborative, involving on-set interaction with many departments and people. In Starting Out in the Evening, though, he had to muzzle what he calls his natural Italian gregariousness to portray a private, very internalized man with no such outlets for freewheeling openness.
“I don’t like the word challenging because I think it’s always overused,” Langella says, “but it does require of you a sort of consistency of intent from beginning to end when you decide that someone is as imploded as this man, as old world-mannered as he is — the way he dresses, the way he thinks, the way he speaks. It requires you to be vigilant about every single moment.”
The result of that dutiful observation and vigilance is rather mesmerizing. Langella is well known for his stage portrayals of larger-than-life characters — including Dracula and Sherlock Holmes, among others — but his modulated performance here is one of managed disappointment. Langella captures Leonard’s palpable regret in evocative fashion before the story even spells out the particulars.
“I’m not as old as he is, but I’m close — we’re the same generation,” Langella continues. “And you can’t get to these years in life without some sort of feelings about what you did wrong, what you did right, who you are, how close is the end, what am I protecting myself against, what am I afraid of? Those things are all just underneath the surface with Leonard.”
| And sometimes it’s those little things underneath the surface, even if recognized and appreciated, that have a difficult time being embraced by mainstream audiences, especially in timely fashion. No matter, though: Langella will continue to discover and excavate them for display, on stage and screen. | |
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