An interesting, if unexpected, juxtaposition occurred yesterday when I caught long-lead screenings of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (Sony Pictures Classics, December 14) and Andrew Wagner’s Starting Out in the Evening (Roadside Attractions, November 23) in back-to-back fashion. Each film is, in its own way, about the struggle of a brilliant man to reconcile within himself the fact that he may not have it in him to finish his final piece of work.
 shaken up when a graduate student (Lauren Ambrose) invades his solitude to mine his life for her thesis work about his out-of-print novels.</p>
<p>They’re very different works — and one is much more successful than the other; more to soon follow on this — but <b>each film tries to tap into the parallel aspiration of artistic and intellectual pursuit — how such devotion compels action but also stunts other behaviors</b>. Artists, writers, academicians and the like are frequently and not always wrongly knocked as selfish, a less-than-venal sin for which the characters here certainly don’t get off free and easy. But <b>there’s a necessity to such self-motivation, which feeds thought and spurs invention as much as salves the soul of the creator</b>. Or at least that’s the justification one peddles…</p>
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