In this week’s column, I want to tell you about a little movie called Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party. Now, don’t tell me you don’t know who Stephen Tobolowsky is, because I sure as heck know you do. C’mon, buddy... Sammy Jenkis, the diabetic amnesiac whose story haunts what’s left of Guy Pearce’s memories in Memento? Bing. The jeweler who falls prey to Annette Bening’s seductive charms in the opening scene of The Grifters and Klan Grand Wizard Clayton Townley in Mississippi Burning? Bing and bing. And of course, Ned Ryerson, a.k.a. “Needlenose Ned” and “Ned the Head,” the annoyingly cheerful insurance salesman who buttonholes Bill Murray the first thing every goddamned morning in Groundhog Day. Stephen Tobolowsky! BING!
Stephen Tobolowsky is one of the busiest and most recognizable character actors in Hollywood. He’s appeared in more than 170 movies and TV shows, including Single White Female, Spaceballs, Thelma and Louise, Deadwood, Basic Instinct, Sneakers, The Insider, Will & Grace, CSI: Miami, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Failure to Launch, rarely appearing higher than sixth or seventh in the credits. He’s a skilled dramatic actor, but his ostrichy body and his balding dome more often get him cast in comedies as bumbling principals and other low-level authority figures. In the movie Garfield, he plays a character named “Happy Chapman,” but he’s actually a dead ringer for Odie.
When you make as many movies in as many locations as Tobolowsky, you tend to accumulate a lot of great stories, and Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party collects the best of the bunch. The concept of the film couldn’t be simpler or more elegant. It’s Tobolowsky’s birthday, he’s going to have a group of friends over that night for barbecue, and as director Robert Brinkmann’s camera watches him peacefully go about his day—walking on the beach, preparing some beer-boiled sausages on the stove in his beautiful kitchen, eventually greeting his guests (including Mena Suvari and Amy Adams) as they arrive at the door—Tobolowsky entertains us with one anecdote after another until you start to wonder how someone as gentle and unassuming and low-key as Tobolowsky could possibly have fit so many funny, scary, bizarre and moving experiences into one lifetime.
There’s the time a group of Buddhist monks in Thailand dragged him into their monastery and beat him up with sticks. (He was later told they were paying him an enormous honour.) There’s the time he and the other members of the rock band he once belonged to smoked a stash of ammonia-laced marijuana that temporarily robbed them of the power of speech. And there’s the cross-country plane ride he once took with three live lobsters seatbelted into the chair beside him the entire trip.
Some of his funnier tales involve the less glamourous side of the acting game: auditioning to play Ronald McDonald in a TV commercial and trying to impress the casting people with his commedia dell’arte training, or being weighed down with 45 pounds of lead and lowered into an ice-cold tank of what he was assured were “vegetarian piranhas” to film his death scene in Bird on a Wire.
Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party reminded me of what I love so much about actors: their willingness to go along with just about any situation, to say “yes” to any challenge, no matter how ridiculous. (Tobolowsky’s first acting job in L.A. was with a Spanish-language children’s theatre troupe; he took the gig, even though he didn’t speak Spanish. “I’ll be like ABBA,” he promised the director. “I’ll learn it all phonetically!” The job didn’t work out too well.) Tobolowsky’s performing instincts were what allowed him to survive his most harrowing experience: being held hostage at gunpoint at a 7-11. He kept the gunman occupied by launching into what was essentially a brilliant 90-minute improv routine.
That description could also apply to Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party, which shares the same loose, casual vibe as other classic storytelling movies like Swimming to Cambodia and My Dinner With Andre. At the same time, that casualness is, of course, an illusion: Brinkmann’s cinematography is handsome and unobtrusive and Tobolowsky’s stories have obviously been honed over the course of many tellings over many years. Still, you never quite know where any of them are going, and many of them sneak up on you with an unexpected emotional force.
The film is being distributed independently through Netflix, Amazon and the official website, www.stbpmovie.com. It’s the perfect birthday present for the moviegoer in your life. (July 13, 2006)
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