Forget it, Jake. It's Groundhog Day.
I've
never met Stephen Tobolowsky. But I'd like to, so I'll raise a
glass of Groundhog Red while facing down the coast L.A.-ward, then hit
play on a DVD I acquired some years ago when it arrived unbidden across
my desk. It's been on my shelves ever since, a disc I like to pop in
when I need some comfortable down-time with an interesting person
(albeit vicariously) and the pleasure of a small (very small),
under-hyped, refreshingly sincere and unaffected independent film.
Stephen Tobolowsky is a Hollywood character actor. You know him, even if you don't
know
him. For over 25 years he's been one of L.A.'s reliable workhorses,
one of the broad-gauge, nearly anonymous actors you've seen everywhere —
Groundhog Day, of course ("Ned Ryerson?" "BING!"),
Memento,
The Insider, TV episodes of
Seinfeld,
C.S.I.,
The West Wing,
Deadwood,
Heroes, recent high-profile recurring roles in
Californication,
Community, and particularly as Sandy Ryerson (Ned's brother?) on
Glee — and, oh, some 200 other films and TV gigs. His
IMDb page lists more than a dozen titles since 2010 alone. His series of podcasts at
/Film, "
The Tobolowsky Files," makes a fine companion to our title under discussion here. If staying
active is the secret to a good life, he has raised the bar for the rest
of us. (Frankly, I'd rather be sitting in front of the bar, but I'm
working on that other thing too.)
It turns out that
when you get him off the set and into the comfort of his Malibu home,
with a pot of beer-boiled sausages for the barbecue, he's also one hell
of a storyteller.
That's who we find in
Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party:
a naturally affable raconteur at ease telling his friends funny,
epiphanal, moving and often bizarre tales from his life. Think of
Stephen (and we may call him Stephen) as a softer, rounder, more
existentially content Spalding Gray, or the film as a
My Dinner with Andre
in a pullover sweater and sensible shoes. Both classically trained and
disarmingly "one of us," when he employs the Pinteresque pause it's
usually to hoist a beer.
Shot
over one day in 2004, the birthday party is the setup for this album
of Stephen's stories. Hosting friends over cake and candles and glasses
clinked together, he dramatizes his twenty-one hours in a freezing
pool with "vegetarian piranhas" and faulty mechanical face-eaters on
the set of
Bird on a Wire. And that time he talked his way out
of a gun pressed to his head in a supermarket by inviting the gunman
over to dinner. Being dragged off the street in Thailand and beaten
with sticks by monks (it was a great honor). His mano-a-mano stare-down
with an alpha-male dolphin. The effects of ammonia-laced marijuana
while fronting a rock band. His early experiences as a young and hungry
actor (Ronald McDonald had no need for
commedia dell'arte training). The Christmas LSD ("if the dog talks to you, always listen"). The time
Buzz
magazine nominated him, temporarily, for the 100 Coolest Guys in L.A.,
a city he describes as "like Hell but with good restaurants."
His
account of his girlfriend's (now wife's) unplanned pregnancy becomes a
way to illuminate connections between the life-altering joys and
losses we share with others. He played a KKK leader in
Mississippi Burning,
and his memories of a harrowing experience with real Klansmen during a
late-night shoot leads to drinks raised in a toast to a young boy's
courage and grace under pressure.
At
6'-2" and deep into male-pattern baldness of Shakespearean
magnificence, he is so ordinary-looking that (he tells us) he's been
mistaken for a forty-year-old box boy. He'd fit into a police lineup
with Paul Giamatti, John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
That
bland average-joeness really accents the telling of his more ribald
stories, and most of those are in this DVD's 90 minutes of extra
scenes. That's where we find his misadventures as a naif among the sex
shows in Thailand, his all-night date with a stripper (it's not what you
think), "live bug tacos," and a college frat party that involved a
300-pound prostitute and the phrase "sloppy twenty-seconds."
How
many of the details are authentic and how many does he embellish for
dramatic or comedic license? When the teller is such good company, does
it matter?
For first-time director (long-time
cinematographer) Robert Brinkmann, this project is a personal labor of
love for his old friend Stephen. With co-producer and editor Andrew
Putschoegl, Brinkmann keeps the film simple and plain-speaking. After
an opening story on Malibu beach — with a timely cameo from a pair of
dolphins — we're in Stephen's kitchen (copper cookware, nice), out back
by the grill, or in his living room, where the camera places us in the
semi-circle of a dozen or so show-biz friends such as actors Mena
Suvari, pre-
Junebug
Amy Adams in blue jeans, Greg Wagrowski and Stephen's wife, actor Ann
Hearn. The rhythm gets shaken up now and then by personal testimonials
from Suvari, Hearn and Wagrowski, but the rest of the time it's all
Stephen's show.
Other
than some of the stories feeling necessarily shaped and rehearsed, the
film displays a welcome lack of artifice. Brinkmann and Putschoegl let
us sometimes glimpse another camera, and they add no techniques
flashier than professional, good-looking point-and-shoot.
It
never pretends to be more than what it is, and that's one of the
reasons it works so well. It's entertainment stripped down to
Aristotelian elementals: a gifted artist telling stories. Its
intentions toward a personal connection between subject and audience
deliver such a pleasant change that
Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party deserves an audience beyond the festival circuit where its buzz began.
In
an email Putschoegl told me that "it appears to have an almost
universal appeal." Indeed. While viewing this disc a second time, my
wife, smitten, uttered, "I want to know him." Then our resident
hip-hopping teenager, transfixed, turned to me and said, "Why isn't he
your friend?"
So Stephen, next time you're in Seattle, call.
By
the way, the DVD is worth mentioning on its other merits too. It was
released in 2006 (on, in fact, the day of Stephen's 55th birthday
party). So that the filmmakers' investment returns stay where they
belong, with the filmmakers, the DVD is available through
the official web site, plus Amazon.com and Netflix. The web site also includes some amusing
trailers not found on the DVD.
It's
a well-produced disc. Shot on high-definition video, the image
delivers a faultless presentation. The DD 2.0 stereo surround audio
isn't showy, though Stephen's occasional piano support (Bach's Prelude
#1 in C Major, Debussy's "Clair de lune") spreads the sound around the
room a bit.
For extras we get those 90 minutes of extra
scenes already mentioned. Any of these fourteen self-contained
outtakes could easily work within the film. Together they become a
slightly raunchier ad hoc
STBP: Part II that's longer than the main attraction's 87 minutes. It's all gold, and their presence here is a welcome bonus.
Music: Sharon Isbin, "Duarte: Appalachian Dreams, Op. 121 - 1. Fantasia"
Near at hand: The moleskin reporter's notebook for "In the Human Museum"
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