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Interview: The world of Stephen Tobolowsky

Features

Ends of the earth

Steven Schachter’s THE DEAL (2007; Kendall Square: November 13 at 7 pm) is moral horror of another variety: Hollywood vapidity. There’s no shortage of such satires, and you might well wonder whether we need another on the heels of Art Linson’s What Just Happened. This bouncy, sharp-edged farce is all inside baseball; its target audience is, to some degree, its own cast and crew. Yet it’s difficult to resist when the purely idiotic is openly mocked by a sure-footed cast of line readers led by William H. Macy (who co-wrote) as a has-been producer who’s saved from suicide by a devilish, life-affirming idea. “We’re in the entertainment business,” he says early on. “I’m entertaining myself.” Which he does by proposing a bio-pic of Benjamin Disraeli (using a script he won’t let anyone read, and which he keeps hiring writers to revamp) starring a black action star (LL Cool J) recently converted to Judaism. Meg Ryan gets a somewhat thankless role as an executive bamboozled into making the film (her inevitable romantic entanglement with Macy’s dead-end sleazebag adds to the ignominy), but the dialogue is fast, and of course the target is a fat, awful, patronizing goldfish in a small bowl begging to be shot.

Perhaps largely by virtue of its indelible Kazakhstan landscapes, Rustem Abdrashev’s THE GIFT TO STALIN[Podarok Stalinu] (2008; Coolidge Corner: November 6 at 9 pm; West Newton: November 13 at 6:30 pm) is the festival entry to take home with you, rough and clear-eyed and immersed in an Asian lifestyle Americans don’t get to see on film very often. The story (by Russian veteran screenwriter Pavel Finn) lands in 1949, when Stalin’s purges were sending trainloads of repatriated Jews to the hinterlands; in one such train full of corpses, a living Jewish boy is found and adopted by the tiny village surrounding the rail stop. The community is a three-dimensional thing, thick with refugees and predatory Russian soldiers and colliding religious identities (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, pagan) but imbued with a Renoir-like generosity. Abdrashev’s eye is sure, and the seductiveness of the film harks back to the mid-century days of big international productions shot in exotic locales. After seeing The Gift to Stalin, you feel you’ve been somewhere.