If Saul Rubinek had his way, the ads for “Bad Manners” would say, “14-year-olds stay out! You’ve got 900 other movies to go to . . . skip this one.” He’d also feel more comfortable if the film’s press kit didn’t proclaim it to be, “A `Virginia Woolf’ for the ’90s.”
The veteran character actor doesn’t think it’s very smart to “take a seminal work of the century, `Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,’ and throw yourself up against it. Why? Let other people discover that, if they need to.”
As for the teenagers, “This is an adult comedy, the likes of which you rarely see on the screen because we live in a world where 14-year-olds rule.”
Even though he’s weighed down by a bout of the flu, Rubinek — a big star in Canada, but familiar in the U.S. mostly for playing unctuous urban professionals in key supporting roles — isn’t in a particularly cranky mood today, and, truth be told, “Bad Manners” isn’t all that explosive a picture. It’s just that he wants to see adults welcomed back into multiplexes, and not forced to find their kind of movies in art houses and video stores.
Intellectually challenging and bitingly funny, “Bad Manners” (opening Friday at the Three Penny Cinema) is a decidedly grown-up — meaning mature, not XXX — entertainment. Adapted from David Gilman’s play “Ghost in the Machine,” which debuted at Steppenwolf Theater in 1993, the film resembles “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” only in that it describes the psychological and sexual volcano that erupts when a pair of academic couples decide to spend a weekend together.
A missing $50 bill and a bizarre musical theory become the catalysts for disaster, as each of the warring parties finds new and increasingly ugly ways to accuse the others of betrayal, dishonesty and fraud. It’s the kind of movie — rare today — that invites debate among viewers as to who was most responsible for the disintegration of the friendships on screen, and what those opinions might mean for their own real-life relationships.
Rubinek plays a musicologist who’s likable despite himself and his insistence that a computer somehow has inserted a refrain from an obscure orchestral work into a random sequence of synthesized phrases. His lover is a beautiful research assistant almost half his age, played by Caroleen Feeney, someone who inspires feelings of jealousy, lust and anger in the weekend’s hosts.
“In this movie, my character’s a pompous, betraying coward, a snob . . . but also a vulnerable, somewhat lovable, honest fellow,” said Rubinek, over a hearty bowl of chicken soup. “Aren’t we all several things, and not just one? The challenge was to bring myself to a character who I didn’t like very much.
“Probably the most interesting of the lot is Caroleen’s character. She’s the most honest and direct, and, ultimately, the one who is betrayed the most. I get back at her (for a perceived slight) by destroying her career to save my own. Nice guy.”
Rubinek’s something of an expert when it comes to playing unlikable characters. It’s a living, after all, and his impressive list of credits includes “Nixon,” “Unforgiven,” “Bonfire of the Vanities,” “Wall Street,” “Against All Odds,” “I Love Trouble” and “Soup for One.”
“Bad guys are always the best roles,” he says. “I like to find something appealing about my characters, whether they’re bad guys or not, and imbue them with whatever charm I can, whatever sense of humor I have in my life and whatever vulnerability I can bring to them.
“That’s what’s fun about playing bad guys. It’s not what they’re like, it’s what they do.”
Still, Rubinek–who joins the cast of “Frasier” during February sweeps as Miles’ divorce attorney, who also happens to be Roz’ former lover–wouldn’t mind playing against type every once in a while, especially in the U.S.
“In America, unless you get a movie that breaks out — and it’s the right time, the right place and the right part — it’s unusual to get a leading role,” he argues. “So, in no studio movies have I had leading roles. If `Getting Even With Dad,’ `Bonfire of the Vanities’ or `I Love Trouble,’ where I had larger roles, had done well, it would have been a different story.
“I’d like to stay in love with what I do. But, it’s really simple. I have to pay the bills and support my family. Sometimes my job is to take sows’ ears and turn them into silk purses. . . . If I think there’s a chance I change it into something I can like, I’ll do it.”
The 50-year-old father of two moved to Canada from Europe when he was a child. The son of Holocaust survivors, Rubinek was born in a United Nations refugee camp in Germany on the same night his father — an actor in Yiddish theater — opened in a production of “The Golem,” and he himself began performing in radio plays when he was 7.
In 1986, he produced and directed “So Many Miracles,” based on the book he wrote about his parents’ ordeal during World War II. The film documents their reunion with the Polish farmers who hid them for 2 1/2 years during the war.
With his wife, Elinor Reid, Rubinek also recently co-produced and directed an entertaining black comedy, “Jerry and Tom,” which was adapted from a one-act play by Chicagoan Rick Cleveland.
Although the U.S. distribution rights were purchased by Miramax before the film debuted at last year’s Sundance festival, the company has yet to announce plans for a release date. “Jerry and Tom” — which is set in Chicago and stars Joe Mantegna, Sam Rockwell, William H. Macy, Charles Durning and Peter Riegert — opened two weeks ago in Toronto to positive reviews and enthusiastic audiences.
Miramax’s reluctance to release the film here, Rubinek suspects, has to do with the recent glut of similarly dark pictures, none of which have caused a stampede at the box office.
“I had directed it here, in L.A., in the spring of 1994 — right before `Pulp Fiction’ came out–as part of a one-act play marathon, and Elinor figured out a way for us to adapt it,” he recalls. “The play was about two guys, one older than other, and their 10-year relationship selling used cars in Chicago, and, on the side, killing people for their boss, Billy. Now, this was before the hitman genre became a cultural phenomenon in America, and before everyone and their brother — including me — was sick of hitmen.”
As a play, Rubinek points out, “Jerry and Tom” was “less about Quentin Tarantino’s world than it was Harold Pinter’s. It was less a play with violence, than it was a play about the consequences of violence.”
His tolerance for gratuitous violence, he adds, “has diminished in direct proportion to the ages of my children — and I was purposely doing a movie in which all the violence takes place off-screen.”
Rubinek hopes that the positive response to “Jerry and Tom” in Canada will encourage Miramax to release the film here next year.
“Miramax did something extraordinary for Elinor, me and my company, Creative Differences, which just got off the ground,” he said. “They put the movie in profit 10 minutes before the first screening. People say they then go into a nightmare situation with Miramax, in which their pictures are butchered or edited or whatever.
“Our experiences couldn’t be better.”
In hindsight, he admits, “I’m glad `Jerry and Tom’ wasn’t released in the United States in competition with all the other dark comedies. I’m not privy to their plans, but it would be great if it was released at the same time Rick Cleveland’s play, `Danny Bouncing,’ opens in Chicago (at the Victory Gardens Theater in February).”
