A Well-Oiled Career

Frank Langella's Second Act Is Rolling Along, Sans the Sleazy Roles

You can look everywhere in Frank Langella's hotel suite and not see the trail of slime. An astonishment! Since the '60s, the actor has played slimebags, scuzzballs, silky lizards, oily seducers, scheming politicos, paranoid bureaucrats and various other infected humans in one form or other. He has made waitresses cry, presidents wince, women disrobe and housewives quite mad. He's sucked blood! He's played Richard Nixon! Surely he secretes something thick, mucus-y, incandescent and instantly fatal to the touch.

Whether as Count Dracula, or as the chief of staff who browbeat President Kevin Kline in "Dave," or even as a pirate named Dawg in "Cutthroat Island," where he almost skewered Geena Davis, he's been a tall, cool glob of human mollusk.

Yet here he is, and not a glint of putrescence in sight. Instead, what greets a visitor is a large man -- 6 feet 4, maybe 230 pounds -- who looks as if he could still go seven or eight rounds, or play linebacker, even though nearing 70. He's dressed not like some avatar of New York's further edges and a connoisseur of its styles of decadence, but more suburban dad: crew-neck sweater over a polo shirt, cargo pants, New Balance slip-ons. He'd look right at home in the Columbia Mall, walking around with his two adult children. It's only when you look carefully that you see in his dark eyes what the camera amplifies so chillingly: a cold intelligence, the gaze that bespeaks ferocity of passion and willingness to harshly speak the truth. The eyes suggest a moral compass that's infinitely adjustable, and a willingness to define what must be done and then do it.

But there's no sense of slippery, slimy slithery-ness at all, and curiously enough, there's no sense of slippery, slimy slithery-ness in his latest performance, in "Starting Out in the Evening." He plays Leonard Schiller, an aging novelist who became the toast of literary New York with his first book but now is a man the world has forgotten -- until the arrival of a questing, attractive, vital young woman, a graduate student with a love for the works of Leonard Schiller.

The Oscar whispers are beginning for this modest little movie that, as it turns out, is something of an anomaly in Langella's professional life. It enables him to be human, of flesh and weakness, not lubricated unction and glossy smarm.

More to the point -- or maybe the whole point -- it's just the first in what some people (though he is not one of them) are calling a Frank Langella renaissance or second coming, as it's the first of four movies in which, after many years as a character actor (after a few brief ones as a headliner), he's the star again.

"I'm lucky enough to find myself in four important movies with four important directors," Langella says. Besides "Starting Out in the Evening," he's got a film version of his Tony-winning turn as Nixon in "Frost/Nixon," a thriller called "On the Hook" and the film he's currently shooting, "The Box," based on a Richard Matheson short story by way of a "Twilight Zone" episode. Though he's worked steadily in the theater (a first love), his movie appearances have been off and on over the years, with long years of absence, followed by microbursts of activity.

"It's not that I've taken time off from the movies," he says with a graceful inversion of the question, restructuring it in a way that will become his interview trademark, "it's that they've taken time off from me."

His reframing of questions is the mark of a careful man, a precise man, not someone high on the octane of celebrityhood or egoism.

Langella is a survivor. You begin to suspect he'll never make the stupid mistake, give in to temptation, begin to believe his own reviews and publicity, or take himself either too lightly or too seriously. He's not acting to get somewhere else. He just wants to be an actor, not a director, a pundit, an impresario, a studio boss.

"I have a wonderful agent," he says, "who knew I'd be interested in ['Starting Out in the Evening']. He's not the kind of agent who's looking for ways to make more money for himself."

It can't have seemed propitious: a small film from a small book, all set in New York and essentially about inside-New York things, from a new director.