Unstrung Heroes
Actor Maury Chaykin says his attraction to role of zany Uncle Arthur was a natural one. He's basically just a child, he says.
The driving force, the center of strength that holds life together for the Lidz family, and particularly for 12-year-old Steven (Nathan Watt), is his mother, Selma (Andie MacDowell).Steven's eccentric father, Sid (John Turturro), is emotionally distant, his extended family is too demanding and his crazy uncles Danny and Arthur (Michael Richards, Maury Chaykin) are, well, too crazy.
So, when Selma is diagnosed with cancer and Sid pulls even deeper into himself, young Steven looks for a way to escape. The obvious choice is to move in with his uncles, who have managed to create their own magical, if bizarre universe, shutting out the troubles of the world.
Uncle Danny is paranoid and ever on the lookout for conspiracies, while Arthur is childlike and innocent. They live together in an apartment filled with unopened newspapers ("We never get around to reading them," Arthur explains), bouncing rubber balls (retrieved from a drainage pipe that brings them downtown from the gutters of Los Angeles suburbs) and, most importantly, memories, which they cherish and attempt to preserve. They are also quite devout in the observance of their Jewish religion.
Set vaguely in the early '60s, "Unstrung Heroes" focuses on Steven's attempts to cope with the difficulties of knowing his mother is dying and that his father is in deep denial. As Sid comes up with all sorts of crackpot remedies he hopes will throw his wife's cancer into remission, Steven realizes he's got to find his own escape valve — and through Danny and Arthur, the boy eventually finds his way.
The characters' relationships are all quite nicely developed, and the performances are uniformly excellent, as young Watt manages to hold his own with the seasoned cast. Chaykin should get more attention after his work here, Richards gets to be both as wacky as his Kramer character on "Seinfeld" and more serious and it's good to see Turturro playing against type and pulling it off so well. MacDowell, with the difficult role of a dying mother who feels she must make every effort to pull the family together before her departure, is first-rate.
Despite some obvious Woody Allen influences here and there, "Unstrung Heroes" is a marvelous feature-film debut for Diane Keaton as a director. The actress (who will next be seen in "Father of the Bride 2" this Christmas) shows a sure hand as she successfully juggles heart-tugging drama and zany comedy in this adaptation of Franz Lidz's autobiographical book (adapted by Richard La Gravanese, who also scripted "A Little Princess" and "The Bridges of Madison County").
The film is rated PG for a few profanities, a couple of vulgar remarks and some violence.
— MAURY CHAYKIN is hardly a household name, though you have probably seen him before. He was the suicidal major confronted by Kevin Costner in the early moments of "Dances With Wolves" and has appeared in a number of box-office hits, including "Twins," "My Cousin Vinny," "Sommersby," "Mrs. Soffel" (with Diane Keaton) and "WarGames," to name just a few of his 50 movie roles.
But there seems little doubt that during 1995 he will receive the most attention of his career so far.
In addition to playing zany Uncle Arthur in "Unstrung Heroes" (directed by Keaton), he has a small role in the Denzel Washington vehicle "Devil in a Blue Dress" (opening next Friday, Sept. 29), and in the big-budget pirate epic "Cutthroat Island" (scheduled for release on Dec. 8), he plays the chief villain (opposite Geena Davis and Matthew Modine).
After finishing "Cutthroat Island" in the spring, he got the role in "Devil in a Blue Dress," and then came `Unstrung Heroes,' " Chaykin said during a telephone interview. "But they pretty much came one after the other."
As a corrupt mayoral candidate for Los Angeles in the late 1940s, Chaykin worked for just a week on "Devil in a Blue Dress." Then he segued into "Unstrung Heroes," where he labored for three months. (Although this was a vacation compared to "Cutthroat Island," on which he spent six months.)
"My concentration and commitment, my focus was much more on `Unstrung Heroes,' " he explained. "This was the kind of script that actors wait for and which rarely comes along. As soon as I read it, I knew I had to be in this movie.
"I had worked with Diane in `Mrs. Soffel' and we had an acquaintance, but we didn't get to know each other until we worked on this. It was a real pleasure getting to know her. She's a really intelligent, talented woman who's just beginning to show her talent in other aspects."
Chaykin read for the part on the first day of auditions, and it was apparent that Keaton and the film's producers were quite happy with his interpretation of the character. But the studio (Walt Disney's Hollywood Pictures division) wanted a "name" actor in the role — for obvious reasons.
With Michael Richards (of TV's "Sein-feld"), as the other uncle, there was a natural advertising peg. `But Diane and the producers held out for me. And then my agent got a call from Jeffrey Kat-zen-berg's office. He was still at Disney at the time (Katzenberg has since left Disney and is now in partnership with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen for Dream-works, SKG).
"He wanted me to put myself on tape as the character and send it to him, but I said, `Absolutely not.' I had read and gotten a positive response — why should I subject myself to this? He probably thought it was nervy of me to say no, but I was definitely not going to do that."
The credit for his finally getting the role, Chaykin says, goes entirely to Keaton and the film's producers. "They showed great integrity in not compromising."
The attraction to the character of Arthur was a natural one, he explained. "He was basically a child, someone who had all his defenses down and had the innocence of a child, the playfulness of a child. It's not often that, as adult actors, we get a chance to do that, to let down all of the defenses and societal pressures. After his mother died, he withdrew from society and started to create a world of his own, to collect things — and not only animate objects, but inanimate objects, like dreams and wishes, too."
Chaykin said he enjoyed working with Richards and found him quite unlike his television persona. "We found that we had a lot in common — our style of working, we're both pretty private. There was not a lot of talking, not a lot of intellectualizing, just basically doing. He's a very nice person and a very philosophical person, very quiet, not at all like Kramer, other than some physical mannerisms that he has. But he doesn't have the energy of Kramer. He has a very different energy."
Though he has an extensive background in theater, Chaykin says he's enjoying movie work more these days. "The money is so much better, of course, and I've grown to love the process of film acting. It's something that is very much a part of my life now — and it's really ironic because, starting out as a stage actor, I never expected it.
"I never imagined nor had the ambition to be a movie actor until the opportunity presented itself."