(2007) In the evening Professor Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), a retired teacher of literature and writer of serious fiction (once associated with Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, and other New York Jewish intellectuals), sits pensively before his manual typewriter before tapping at the keys.

His daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor) will celebrate her 40th birthday during the film; a former dancer, she now teaches Pilates and exercise classes at the Y because that's what happens when dancers age. She briefly renews a relationship with Victor, a lawyer, with whom she wants to get pregnant but not married, before resuming a romance with a former black boyfriend, Casey Davis (Adrian Lester), with whom she wants to raise a family, except that he doesn't want children, a sore point that ended their previous association.

"What's new?" Casey asks on their first meeting following a lengthy separation. "I just joined the glee club," she answers. "When?" "Just now." Of all Ariel's male interests her father disapproved of Casey.

In an audience with Professor Schiller, a young graduate student from Brown University working on her master's thesis, Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), asks if he would consent to interviews with her for biographical details to accompany her analysis of his novels. At first he politely declines saying he can't afford distractions from his work, considering his age and a previous heart attack, at completing the novel he's been composing for the past ten years. However, he offers her a copy of his last published book, The Lost City; she pilfers a photo of him as a young man from his study.

Later Professor Schiller relents, inviting Heather into his past and thought processes. During their conversations he says that he lets his characters have the freedom to go their own way; as an author he has no plan before starting a book other than simply following his characters about, recording what they do. Heather's probing questions become painful for Leonard to answer, but she establishes a firmer hold on him by relating how during a difficult relationship with a young man she read his first novel Tenderness: "Your novels set me free…. You gave me the courage to live my own life." To this she adds boldness (like Joan Didion, Joni Mitchell, Joan of Arc), persistence, and seduction.

Their intimate colloquies continue. She asks if he thinks people will be reading his novels one hundred years from now. To which he replies, Will anyone be reading a hundred years hence? "What keeps you going?" she asks. "The madness of art." Nevertheless, Leonard refuses her request to be allowed to read his unfinished manuscript.

Referring to F. Scott Fitzgerald's phrase of the "solid gold bar," the pervading theme running through a great writer's work, Heather comments on the change - The Lost City baffles her in comparison to his first two novels - the inconsistency in his later writing. Research provides her with a "single unhappy event" in Leonard's life the year before Stella's death more than twenty years ago. This provokes an outburst from Leonard: "Insult me that I should write the same book over and over again!"

There is the difficulty of understanding another person as well as of making oneself understood with each of these characters. This film is a character study. As we follow them through their perambulations and interactions, we see how Heather is a driven, ambitious young woman, often tactless but fiercely focused on her objective, willing to take chances to score; flighty Ariel, who may be fifteen years older, acts less mature than Heather, lacking a center to her life, having lost her mother and never feeling a bond with her father, a dancer without balance, as she reaches out in different directions for something or someone to hold onto; Casey, the most appealing character, the only one who recognizes the "guts" within The Lost City, possesses core convictions, the "solid gold bar," which allows him the freedom and confidence to make compromises and take risks without losing his equilibrium.

As for Leonard the author, who tells Heather, "You gave an old man some excitement," but slaps her for her insolence of revealing intimate details of his life in her manuscript, though he defends her against Ariel's unwittingly judgmental remark, and says to his rescuing angel Casey, "My body's not my own: time to die," from all of them he recovers a sense of artistic purpose and human proportion (we could call it love). This film may represent his final novel.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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