Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) is a New York writer and contemporary of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and others. He has written four novels, all of which are now out of print. For the past ten years since he quit teaching literature at a college, he has been laboring on a fifth novel. At 70, he moves slower. His only breaks from his daily writing routine are for visits and short excursions with his 40-year-old daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor), a dancer and exercise instructor who has never been much of a reader. Leonard, whose wife died when their daughter was a teenager, feels he has failed as a father because Ariel seems to be adrift. When her old boyfriend, Casey (Adrian Lester), moves back in town, they resume their love relationship but still disagree about the issue of children. She wants them; he doesn't.
Leonard has breakfast with Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), a pretty and ambitious graduate student who wants to interview him for her master thesis on his work. She is convinced that she can reintroduce his novels to the literary world. Leonard, who fiercely protects his writing schedule, politely refuses her offer. But when a publisher tells him that the times have changed and that publicity and celebrity confessions are all important, the veteran novelist realizes that it might not be a bad idea to do the interview and be seen around town with Miss Wolfe. She has published some articles in literary journals.
Heather comes to his apartment and approaches his writing room as if it were a shrine. It turns out that his first two novels had a profound impact upon her, giving her the courage to go to the college of her choice in New York and to live her own life. Now Heather wants to know the man behind the words and what has kept him writing for so many years. Leonard claims that he just follows his characters around waiting for them to do something interesting. He evades her questions about his private life and marriage, and she concludes that he, like the characters in his later novels, has gone into hiding.
At a literary gathering, Heather meets a magazine editor who knows very little about Leonard's work and claims to have little interest in "white guys in suits who go to bed early." But Heather's attraction to the veteran writer goes beyond respect for his work, and she expresses that in a romantic gesture which mystifies and then pleases Leonard, who responds with a gentle one of his own.
Andrew Wagner directs this small and intimate drama, which is based on a novel by Brian Morton. Frank Langella gives an Academy Award caliber performance as the reticent, rigid, and physically vulnerable novelist who realizes that his time is limited and that he needs to make the right choices of what to do with the precious moments he has left. This becomes even more apparent when he has a stoke and is slowed down even more.
Heather is disappointed when she doesn't get all she wants from Leonard, but she does shake up his world and open him up to the transformation he needs to stir up his creative juices. Wagner has made a very modest movie that will have special appeal to those interested in literary matters. Schiller is a dinosaur, and he correctly worries about the fact that within 100 years no one will be reading anymore. But that is even more reason to carry on.
Special DVD features include closed captioning and a commentary by director Andrew Wagner.
