In ‘The Cooler,’ the actor’s at his pinkie-ringed best as the operator of a fading Vegas casino. He also will be on hand tonight as the movie opens the 11th Annual Hamptons International Film Festival
Lady Luck is smiling on Alec Baldwin these days. The actor, who has seen plenty of ups and downs in recent years, is riding a wave of positive buzz for his role in “The Cooler.” No megabucks marquee action here, though; the closely observed character drama, set in the seediest casino in Las Vegas, is an archetypal low-budget independent film. And Baldwin, a bankable Hollywood star since the days of “Beetlejuice” and “Married to the Mob,” isn’t even the lead. That role goes to William H. Macy, as the title character, a lose whose job it is to snap high rollers out of their winning streaks but the sheer ill fortune of his sad-sack presence.

But as Shelly Kaplow, a ruthless operator who still clings to the glory days of the Rat Pack, stubbornly defending his fading casino – The Shangri-La – against encroaching forces of modernization, Baldwin displays a hard-bitten vigor. He exploits a juiciness, a pinkie-ring aplomb, that audiences may have forgotten about. Rolling Stone Magazine, in its summer survey, lauded the Massapequa native as the “hot” character actor of the moment. The leading man flips the script and comes up a winner.

“I’ll take it anyway I can get it,” Baldwin says, appreciative of the praise, even if bleary eyed on a recent late afternoon. He’s arrived at Papparadella, an old-school Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side, in the midst of a hectic day. Howard Stern had him first thing in the morning, grilling him about his sex life (the actor, no dummy, handled it graciously), and now he’s working a little more promotion for “The Cooler,” which tonight kicks off the Hamptons International Film Festival. (Baldwin, who lives in East Hampton, will be a guest of honor). He juggles a cell phone, a newspaper, a sheaf of documents and a bookmarked copy of Al Franken’s “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.” Baldwin, an outspoken “Hollywood liberal” who often has been a target of conservative pundits such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, even looks as if he’s on the stump: dark blue blazer, red striped tie, gray flecked hair swept up in a telegenic flourish. And, indeed, he can hold forth persuasively on what he perceives as the sad state of the nation. (“Hat’s off to Schwarzenegger for what he did,” he says, candidly stunned that the action star won the California Gubernatorial recall election, but then adds: “They pulled it off perfectly in that cynical, Machiavellian way. Although he insists he’s not shopping for any roles in public service, Baldwin projects an air of very “West Wing” gravitas. Or maybe it’s just the husky, sotto voce tones he speaks in – something that lent his role in “The Cooler” much of its authority. Funny thing is, Baldwin says, it’s a movie he almost decided not to do.

“This has one of those unusual scripts where you get to what I call the ‘kill page.’ We shouldn’t reveal this but, there’s a critical moment, and this moment is comparable to when you walk into the kindergarten bus with a flamethrower and kill everybody, I called my agent. I said, ‘I’m not doing this movie.’ There are a half dozen things I won’t do in a movie. This horrible thing happens. He says ‘Read the next page.’ ”

Baldwin did. And realized that Shelly, though monstrous, wasn’t quite the monster he seemed to be – just an alert alpha dog in a town of grifters, two-bit mobsters and elderly tourists in Hawaiian shirts. “He’s this guy who’s onto everything. He knows what’s going on; I thought that was interesting.”
Director Wayne Kramer, who makes his feature debut with “The Cooler,” likens Baldwin’s performance as “driving the smoothest luxury automobile.” The tight 21-day shoot was scarcely so deluxe, and, as Kramer notes, Baldwin’s off-screen life was rocky at the time. He was dealing with his divorce from actress Kim Basinger. The tabloids were hounding him. But he comes to the set and pulls off the most intense scene in the movie. “Alec has such an edge to him, such a charismatic, brooding quality,” Kramer says. “It’s like there’s something always about to explode under the surface. There’s always something going on in the press about Alec, but that is completely irrelevant. What I saw is one of the greatest actors I’ve ever worked with.”

The movie also gave Baldwin a chance to work with one of his favorite actors: Macy, with whom he first worked in 1996’s “Ghosts of Mississippi” “All actors crave someone who can volley with them,” Baldwin says. “Its Bill’s movie. But there’s not a lot of guys I would do that for. With Bill, it’s great! I’m a fan of his.” To prove it, he does a pitch-perfect imitation of Macy, as the hapless car salesman/ kidnapper of “Fargo”: “This is my deal Wayne.”
“If you’re lucky,” he says, “you do a movie that stays with you. That was Bill in Fargo.’”

 

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