Memory, Too, Is an Actor

There are lies and damned lies, and then there is memory. Writer Tobias Wolff reflects that "memory becomes an actor on its own. You try to make it tell the truth, and that's the best you can do." He is talking about his 1989 memoir, This Boy's Life, justly praised for the dead-on honesty of its scruffy boyhood self-portrait.

Ten years earlier, his elder brother, Geoffrey Wolff, had published his own memoir, The Duke of Deception, a remarkable account of life with their father Arthur Wolff, a loving, brilliant rogue who was a lifelong bankrupt, scamster and confidence man. "A bad man and a good father," Geoffrey wrote after he floated free of the wreckage his father had created. Tobias recalls that he admired Geoffrey's book but that some of the characterizations seemed jarringly out of key. Then his own book came out. It told of their mother's cross-country flight with him, leaving Geoffrey behind with Arthur, and ending up with a brutish new husband in a backwoods Washington town. Geoffrey had a similar reaction, or so his brother recalls: Yes, yes, but no; it wasn't exactly like that. "It was a lesson in perception and subjectivity," says Tobias, "so in the end I had great sympathy for Geoffrey's book."

Beyond damned lies and memory, however, there is Hollywood. Each brother sold his memoir to Warner Bros., and by coincidence, the same screenwriter, Robert Getchell, did both scripts. The Duke of Deception is still being sniffed by stars (Richard Gere is mentioned), but This Boy's Life hits the multiplexes this week. Geoffrey is silent about the film, but Tobias answers his phone cheerfully enough.

He accepts what producer Art Linson says about writers who sell their books to the movies: "You bought the ticket, and you have to take the ride." Tobias grumbles only a bit. He doesn't think much of Getchell's script, which seems to him "a little banal and sitcomish, with a few cheap thrills thrown in." He objects to a rough sex scene between Robert De Niro, who plays the churlish stepfather Dwight, and Ellen Barkin, who plays the mother Caroline. (The Wolff brothers' mother is Rosemary in real life.) Tobias believes the sex scene breaks the film's point of view, since otherwise the entire action is observed through the boy Toby.

But he admits that Getchell and director Michael Caton-Jones found a way to make the movie work. "It took me out of myself," he says, rather oddly for somebody who is supposed to be seeing his own boyhood. What he means, he says, is that "I was watching a movie; I was caught up in it." The main street of Concrete, Washington, looks, after a lot of work by set builders, exactly as it did in the '50s. Tobias thinks the actors were marvelous, particularly Leonardo DiCaprio as Toby in a car-stealing scene, a dumb adolescent stunt that happened just the way it was filmed.