Alan Alda tackles heartfelt role in tale of aging

<p>Alan Alda is a nice guy. If there’s a single characteristic to his career of roles in stage, screen and television – especially television, where he reigned as Hawkeye Pierce for ten seasons on “M*A*S*H” – it’s that he seems like someone you’d like to hang with. </p><p>Even when he plays something resembling an antagonist, like Senator Brewster in “The Aviator,” interrogating an unbalanced Howard Hughes before a national television audience, or a similar character on “The West Wing,” you couldn’t quite hate him. </p><p>So it was no real surprise to interview him by phone from Boston a few days ago and find him courteous and generous. His answers were thoughtful and careful, and he often would start and stop until he found the right way to say what he meant. “There are a lot of us who want to maintain the captaincy of our own lives,” he said about his character in his latest movie, “Diminished Capacity,” premiering locally at the Sonoma Valley Film Festival on April 10 & 11. And “captaincy” is just the right word.</p><br><br>“Diminished Capacity” tells the story of Rollie Zerbs (Alan Alda), an aging eccentric whose sister fears is going beyond mere eccentricity and becoming a danger to himself and others. She calls her son (Matthew Broderick) to talk him into going to a home where he can be taken care of; but the son has his own problems, having suffered a several concussion several months earlier. <BR><br> Together with Broderick’s high school flame (Virginia Madsen) and her 12-year old son, they head off to Chicago with a priceless baseball trading card that Rollie hopes he can sell to pay for his own care, and prevent his humiliation. There’s a series of adventures and misadventures, some of them reminiscent of “Little Miss Sunshine.” In fact, that led to my first question: <BR><br> <i><b>Question:</b>I thought there were similarities with Little Miss Sunshine, and I imagine others did as well, where you have a carload of misfits headed off to make a score, if you will. </i> <br> <b>Alda:</b> I never saw any connection between us and “Little Miss Sunshine,” but I see what you mean… I don’t think anybody connected with it was thinking of “Little Miss Sunshine,” except maybe for the box office grosses, maybe they were probably hoping for that. <BR><br> <i>But it’s that sort of classic indie movie, it has an indie cast—you, Virginia Madsen, Matthew Broderick, Dylan Baker-- and indie is sort of the “new Hollywood,” in a way. </i> <br> Alda: Hollywood has tried to buy their way into the independent movies field, and has kind of co-opted it. It’ll be interesting to see if they destroy it in the process. <BR><br> The nice thing about the independent film community was that it always interested in making films that the big studios wouldn’t touch. Now that the big studios are making them, or are buying the companies that are making them, the indies don’t go quite as much against the grain as they did before. <BR><br> This movie was made by a small company with people who wanted to make something interesting regardless of the financial outcome. And I think that’s really nice, that’s an old fashioned way to make a movie. <BR><br> <I>I was doing some background, and read that you never really trained as an actor… did you just fall into it or just figure it was something you could do and started doing it? </i> <br> <i>(Laughing)</i> No, it’s a little harder than that. For somebody who’s actually learned how to act by hook or by crook, that’s a funny way to put the question. It’s like saying, did you just decide to fly an airplane one day. <br><br> <i>Well it’s because you make it look easy! </i> <br> Now that’s a more complimentary thing to say. The thing is, I stood in the wings from the time I could stand, watching my father and other performers and actors … you learn a lot from watching from the wings. I was on the inside of it for a long time, and started learning at my father’s knee from a very early age. <br><br> By the way I don’t recommend to young people that they not study. Actually study is good, I just couldn’t afford to study, that’s one of the reasons I didn’t formally study. But it took longer as a result for me to learn how to do it. <br><br> <i>But it is interesting, because you often hear that acting is really difficult, but then there’s people like you who make it look so easy, so people think, Hey, I could do that! </i> <br> It’s one of the few arts that if you’re good at it you make it look like something that happens every day. Painting doesn’t happen every day, because people don’t hold still that long. Architecture doesn’t happen every day, because what they do turns into a building. <br><br> But if you’re good at acting, you look like somebody moving and thinking and talking just the way other people do in real life. And it’s not that clear that it’s a distillation and an abstraction of real behavior. The things actors go through in an hour and a half on the screen or on the stage don’t occur in real life like that, and yet there has to appear to be a natural flow. Real life isn’t that concentrated and pungent. It’s not that easy to do. <br><br> <i>It sounds like something that’s almost becomes intellectual; you have to structure your performance in a larger canvas. </i> <br> It’s very intellectual. But it’s not only intellectual, it involves the emotions, and the physical body and whatever the spirit is. And all those things have to cooperate. It’s a very difficult to combine all those things. It takes everybody a very long time. <br><br> <I>Are you working on anything as a writer? </i> <br> I’m always writing. The first picture I wrote was called “The Seduction of Joe Tynan,” and it was a really nice hit, and the next picture was a nice hit (“The Four Season”). I like the other pictures I wrote, they didn’t do as well, but that’s okay, I enjoyed doing them. <br><br> Right now I’m writing a play about Einstein for the World Science Festival in New York that I’m helping put on, it’ll be on in May (May 28-June 1). I’m working on a production of “L’Histoire du Soldat,” a Stravinsky piece that I’m putting on month later in New York. And I just finished an extra chapter for a paperback edition of my second book, "Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself." <br><br> <i>Do you have any other works in production? </i> <br> Right now I’m shooting a science series called “The Human Spark” that’s going to be on PBS. We’re shooting in Boston, talking to experts on chimps at the Yerkes [National Primate Research Center], and then we’re going all around the country, so I can’t go to the Sonoma festival. <br><br> <i>Well, we’ll miss you. Like a handful of other places, we have an avid film community here…</i> <br>It sounds like it, I’m sorry I can’t be there, I love the movie and it’d be fun again to hear it with an audience. <br><br> <i>What do you hope people take with them when they see “Diminished Capacity”?</i><br> What I see in this movie that moves me, and it would be nice for me if the audience had a sense of this, is that this guy that I play is fighting to control his life his own way, and not have somebody else tell him how he’s going to end his life, being shuffled off to some place where they don’t think his brain is working right. <br><br> I have a lot of sympathy for that character, and I think a lot of people, whether or not they are having trouble with their memory or any other part of their body, there are a lot of us who want to maintain the captaincy of our own lives. I think it’s a powerful emotion and I’d like to see people respond to that. And I think they will.