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Directed by: Andrew Wagner

Cast:Frank Langella, Lauren Ambrose, Lili Taylor, Adrian lester, Jessica Hecht

This movie is not for everyone. It moves a bit slowly in the beginning, and assumes a few things about its audience. But the overall feel of the movie, and the message that it communicates is very endearing.

Langella is Leonard Schiller, an aging novelist, who time not only has forgotten, but really never really knew in the first place. A grad student shows up who is adamant to resurrect his career through her thesis. A dose of reality later, they are spending enormous amounts of time talking about his life and writing. Langella’s performance is so textured and subtle that we can feel his pain while recollecting his stories and his anxiety while (almost) touching Heather (Lauren Ambrose) for the first time.

The heart of the story, however, is what role Leonard’s life had in his art, and how his dedication to the art may have shunned his life and the lives of those around them. Heather turns out to love this writer because strong women characters in his first two books inspired her to break with her boyfriend and go away to college. Schiller’s first novels “set her free.” His second two novels she can’t understand because they changed focus to politics and the strong, independent women dropped out. Wanting to know more on that, Heather finds out that it happened because Schiller’s wife died. Schiller fights Heather’s investigations every step of the way, and sensibly opposes her simplistic biographical approach. He ends by dismissing her thinking and her thesis, considering her attentions flattered him. Nonetheless Heather’s interest and warmth and eventually what seems to be her love seemed to rejuvenate him for a while. In the end it all appears to have been too much for him.

Ariel (Lili Taylor) seems a nice contrast to her father, lively and natural. But as time goes on it’s clear Ariel is just as stuck as Leonard but without any creative accomplishments behind her. In a moment of crisis she calls an old number and finds that Casey (Adrian Lester), her African American ex-lover, is back in town and ready to resume the relationship. Appropriately for the story’s themes, he’s an intellectual involved with a journal. It emerges that personally he’s as stuck as everybody else. Things still have to be on his terms.

Leonard is so shut down that you want to shake him. Langella makes a powerful impression; he’s what you remember after the movie’s over, but you wish he’d let the character breathe a bit more. The film’s most memorable scenes are certainly those in which he and Heather timidly touch surprising Leonard and us.