Substance abuse

A father stricken by the Holocaust excoriates his son in order to compel him to excellence. No, it's not Shine but that other movie about the toll of familial love, memory, and the uncompromising quest for excellence -- The Substance of Fire. Armin Mueller-Stahl and Geoffrey Rush got the Oscar nods for the former film. Reprising his staggeringly powerful stage performance in Substance, Ron Rifkin got nothing. Could it be that the character he plays -- tormented publisher and intolerable dad Isaac Geldhart -- was just too much of an asshole?

"I love Isaac, I'm moved by Isaac, by his quest for excellence, by his passion," says Rifkin, who's perhaps most familiar to viewers from his recurring roles on the TV series ER and Hill Street Blues. "I recognize so much of myself in Isaac, though at first I don't know how in the world I could play that part, because it was so foreign to me, that accent, that world. But from the minute I read it out loud, I knew that this was something that released and touched something inside me that was there and I could not articulate except to say it was something I understood."

Having never seen the play, since he acted in every performance of it, Rifkin didn't understand exactly what his kinship was to Isaac until he saw a screening of the film with his brother.

"We sat together, my brother and I, and at some point during the film either he reached out to me or I reached out to him, and we found ourselves, I don't know if we were holding hands or were touching each other, and after the film was over, he said, `It's Dad.' And not that that's my father, but in some strange way seeing it on screen and seeing myself for an hour and 45 minutes it was my dad, I had created my dad, who had just died. It was pretty emotional."

Rifkin would also have found some acknowledgment of his performance by the Academy emotional. Nonetheless, he insists that playing the role itself was rewarding enough.

"I'm not a star and I never really dreamed about being a star. The most I can wish for myself is that I get to play a great part, so to set myself up to think about things like that would be foolish. I'm so thrilled that people like this movie; it's a new experience for me. I've never had a lead in a movie before. The most I could hope for is that those people who make those big movies will go, 'Oh, Rifkin, yeah, he was pretty good in that film.' As for an Oscar, I'd be so happy, my mother would be so happy -- but how can I set myself up for such disappointment? But it would have been nice."

What would be even nicer, Rifkin believes, is for audiences to learn from the shattered family depicted in this film the dynamics of family combat and the power of familial love, to understand how the overwhelming shadow of the past can be mitigated by compassion, tolerance, and forgiveness.

"In a sense this film is about war, war on a large scale, as in the Holocaust. But it's also about war on an intimate scale, the intimate battle that goes on in the family. The beginning of the movie is the war itself; the second half of the movie is the aftermath of the war. How do people deal with that? I mean, every family fights, every family has a degree of hatred and venom and rage that spews out.

"How do you love each other again after that, how do you pick up the pieces and reconcile with the people you love? When you watch something like this, if you can separate your own emotions from it and see that this is not your family, but that there are certain aspects of your family in it, then you can learn from it. I hope that people will look at this and say, 'That's not what I want. I want to be able to say to my kids, I love you.' "

-- PK