On Movies: The wrong guy for 'Adam' was right, after all

The Earl of Essex in HBO's

Elizabeth I

? Unaware. Brother Buddy in

Evening

, the one with

Meryl Streep

and

Vanessa Redgrave

? Not familiar.

Max Mayer admits that when his casting director first suggested Hugh Dancy for the title role in Adam, there wasn't more than an iota of recognition there.

"I confessed that I had only seen Ella Enchanted," explains Mayer, referring to the 2004 Anne Hathaway fairy tale. "And I only saw that because I have a 7-year-old daughter, so I didn't know much more than Prince Charming when it came to Hugh."

But Mayer, a veteran theater and TV guy making only his second foray into feature films, went ahead and met with the slight, serious actor anyway.

"And then this British, incredibly socially adept young man appeared and we're talking for a little while and I thought that maybe this is exactly the wrong guy," Mayer says with a laugh.

And that's because the part Mayer was looking to fill was that of a socially inept New Yorker - a guy with Asperger's syndrome.

"Max's line is that on first meeting I seemed too comfortable in my own skin," says Dancy a little while later - the two of them, plus leading lady Rose Byrne, in Philadelphia recently on a whistle-stop publicity tour. "And that eventually he realized I had the requisite insecurities."

Dancy, as the posters attest, did indeed land the job. In Adam, which opened Friday at the Ritz Five and the Showcase at the Ritz Center/NJ, Adam Riki is an intense computer engineer with dual obsessions - astronomy and theater - and a daunting neurological condition. He has Asperger's, a sort of high-functioning autism, making it difficult to carry on the sort of simple social exchanges that most folks take for granted.

And love? Romance? Nigh impossible.

Well, not in Mayer's movie, which, in fact, is a love story: Dancy's Adam and the grade-school teacher, Beth - played by Byrne - who moves into the same brownstone walk-up. The film tracks the tricky, tentative - and quite possibly untenable - relationship between these two people whose internal wiring is completely at odds.

For Mayer, who became fascinated with Asperger's after listening to a radio show on the subject, the story of Adam isn't just a Rain Man romance - it's a metaphor that translates beyond the parameters of a specific mental condition.

"I think it has something to do with being an only child and having a certain kind of observer stance in the world," the writer/director says about why he was drawn to the topic. "But more importantly, the more I learned about it, the better metaphor it felt like to me for human relations in general. Because as opposed to more profound autism, people with Asperger's value and desire the kind of connection with other people that all the rest of us have. It's the same impulse.

"But yet they don't have a lot of the skills that people take for granted in trying to make those connections," Mayer continues.

"We all are in this situation where we want deep connections to other people, but we're all wired to be sitting up here in our own brains and not knowing what's going on with others. It's like trying to make a connection with an alien."

In fact, Mayer says the first title for his screenplay wasn't Adam. It was Alien Life.

Mayer, a founder and producing director of New York Stage and Film - Vassar College's long-running summer theater program - attended the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s. (His Penn roommate, and still close friend, is Ken Olin, the thirtysomething actor-turned-TV director.) Apart from his college stint in Philly, Mayer has been a lifelong New Yorker, and Adam is the kind of New York movie that feels authentic, right down to the accents.

Which is an accomplishment, given that Dancy hails from the United Kingdom, and Byrne from Australia.

"That's the most popular comment at the Q & As, after the screenings," says Byrne. " 'Oh my god I can't believe it! How do you do it?' Which is understandable.

"It is weird, when you meet someone, and they don't sound anything like the character you've just spent two hours watching onscreen!"

"The Town," a.k.a. "Prince of Thieves." So, if Guillermo Del Toro was a big enough fan of Chuck Hogan's crime thrillers to ask him to collaborate on the filmmaker's vampire book, The Strain, then you should probably go read one of Hogan's novels and see what the big deal is, right?

And after racing through the terrific Boston-set bank-heist suspenser Prince of Thieves, it's easy to see why another filmmaker - Ben Affleck - wanted to work with Hogan, too. Well, not exactly work with him, but work from his book, turning it into a movie.

Which is what's happening right now in Boston, where shooting of the rechristened The Town is about to get under way, with Affleck directing and starring. Affleck - who made his directing debut with Gone Baby Gone, another crime caper set in the city by the Charles - plays a Beantown bank robber who falls for the manager of one of the banks he and his gang hold up. Rebecca Hall, Vicky in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is the bank manager. And Jon Hamm, the brooding ad-agency mystery guy of AMC's Mad Men, has signed on as the FBI agent who also tumbles for the manager while he's busy trying to chase down the perp. (The Hurt Locker's bomb-squad wild man, Jeremy Renner, has just been signed, too.)

Hogan, a video-store clerk-turned-best-selling scribe, had collaborated on an earlier draft of the Prince of Thieves screenplay when Adrian Lyne was attached to direct. Hogan's watching from the sidelines this time around.

The book, by the way, is un-put-downable. A perfect summer read.