Frank Langella’s Oscar evening plans were finalized this morning — 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 a Best Actor nod.
While Tommy Lee Jones’ somewhat surprising nomination for In the Valley of Elah, a miniscule arthouse release ($6.7 million take, domestically) whose time had come and gone earlier in the fall, probably took the last up-for-grabs spot, Starting Out in the Evening, from indie distributor Roadside Attractions, never really could 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. 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 found himself on the outside looking in, done in by fickle big city arthouse 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 an 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.
Langella, who just turned 70 years old earlier this month, comes across as intelligent and exceedingly well spoken in person, and radiates a calm rootedness that comes from total self-assurance — a surprisingly rare quality in a lot of young actors. 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.” For the full feature interview piece, from FilmStew, click here.
