R.I.P. Charles Grodin

Charles Gordon died a few weeks ago. It’s always strange how children learn about movie stars, which is often strange accidents of what our parents let us watch and what we encounter, but for me, no matter how many of his other works I’ve seen, Charles Gordon will always be Nicky Holiday from The Great Muppet Caper.

It’s not because I think of him primarily as a jewel thief romancing Miss Piggy (while wearing flowered socks and being Diana Rigg’s brother) that I was so unaware of much of his career. To read his obituaries I discovered that he was an award-winning writer and director working in theater and television. An old episode of Saturday Night Live he hosted where the conceit was that he had skipped rehearsals and he didn’t know that the show was live has to be one of the funniest in the history of the show. There were talk show appearances with Johnny Carson and David Letterman which are online which are hilarious. The best ones are honestly when he doesn’t have anything to plug (or just doesn’t care) and he’s just being entertaining and making the host and the audience laugh.

As an actor, Grodin had an impressive career. Over the past fifty years he was in The Heartbreak Kid, Catch-22, Heaven Can Wait, Real Life, Ishtar, Midnight Run. I keep thinking how his performance in The Heartbreak Kid really made the film work. His performance and Elaine May’s direction were so critical because it’s such a delicate dance. In Midnight Run, Grodin was hilarious as the mob accountant. There’s a reason why the film has been called the great buddy film of all time. Those scenes between Grodin and co-star Robert De Niro, which were often improvised, were the highlight of the film. The famous scene of the two in the box car talking about the good looking chickens is a highlight.

I always think of Grodin as working in the same vein as Elaine May and not because he was in two films she directed (The Heartbreak Kid and Ishtar) but because they shared a comedic sensibility that was character driven and character focused. It was affectionate and probing humor, but it also wasn’t afraid to get dark. Grodin was one of the actors who came up in the wake of what Nichols and May and others had been doing. He was a great talker, a skilled improviser, but he could also say more with a silent look than most actors could manage.

Of course Grodin was also restless. Or maybe he wouldn’t have been so restless if he’d had better material to work with and was offered funnier and smarter movies. But he had a talk show for years and wrote books and recorded radio commentaries.

It’s two of the roles he took towards the end of his life that really stick with me. In part because they are recent, but also because I think in both cases the writer/directors understood Grodein’s sent eof humor and his style and his work and were able to craft roles that managed to be great roles and be great roles for him.

One is Louie, and Louie CK is, well, the less said about his behaviors the better, but Grodin’s role is simply some of the best writing CK did on the series. It’s the perfect pairing of actor and material, and the way that Grodin is so disinterested in his patient’s back pain. And then he explains how the spine evolved, how walking vertically changed how the spine works and in another 20,000 years it should be done evolving. Or a later monologue that Grodin delivers about love and loss which is so sad and beautiful, and whether one believes that is what love is or not, it says so much in such a short time.

The other great role he had was in Noah Baumbach’s film While We’re Young which starred Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. He plays Watts’ father, a legendary documentary filmmaker and there’s one exchange with his daughter before going to a celebration that has stayed in my mind:

“You know, looking back on my career, I wonder, how did I accomplish so much? If I'm honest with myself, it sometimes took being a selfish prick at the expense of you and your mother. Of course, I don't say that. I say talent, work, luck. Your husband doesn't realize what it takes, he... He still believes the speeches.”

Yes, they’re Baumbach’s words, but I like to think that with those two roles, one of the reasons that Grodin said yes to doing them, was because they had something to say. Old men who have come to an age where they understand the world better in some ways than they ever have, but few have much interest in their insights. But there is a sad weariness with which they look back. They did a lot and they haven’t had a bad life. They don’t regret what they did. But they realize what it cost and what they’ve lost and they feel that very acutely.

So many of Grodin’s characters seemed self aware, almost too self aware. they were looking out for all the angles, they were manipulating people, and in some of his final roles, he was still playing those characters. But older and less interested in trying to play all the angles. Instead they’re trying to get by. They have work, which they still care about, and little else, but they’re okay with that. There’s work. Even if work becomes annoying (like having to deal with people complaining about back pain, because that’s just an engineering problem). They may be louts. They may be jerks. Worse, they may be right. To find a darkness and pathos to his characters and life, but he sees life as being light and not heavy in the philosophical sense, and operates from that principle. Which is why when he was funny, when he found honesty in a character or a scene, it hit so deep and rang so true. It takes a special kind of performer to embody all of this – and make us like them. Hell, make us love them. Charles Grodin was that kind of talent.