"Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game" deals from an interesting and unusual deck of cards.
The movie is the first feature film written and directed by Dr. Howard L. Weiner, a 73-year-old internationally renowned Harvard neurologist whose scientific investigations and search for therapies have included tackling Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis and Lou Gehrig's disease.
Starring Martin Landau and Paul Sorvino as two polar opposites who form an unlikely friendship as reluctant residents in a nursing home, the film would be Landau's final acting appearance. Also in the cast as Landau's wife is Ann Marie Shea of Worcester, a well-known theater actor and retired professor of the theater at Worcester State University who is still relatively new to movies.
"Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game" was shot at the end of 2015 in Newburyport, then spent a year in postproduction. It debuted at New York City's Tribeca Film Festival last year and has been steadily gaining momentum and distribution.
The film will be shown as part of the Central Mass. International Jewish Film Festival at 2 p.m. Jan. 28 in the Worcester JCC Auditorium.
Weiner said, "Unfortunately I'll be in California (Jan. 28), otherwise I would have come." Shea, however, does intend to attend.
She has seen the film once before, at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. "That was the last time I saw Martin Landau, and he was his gracious self," Shea said.
Landau died July 15 last year after a brief hospitalization. He was 89. "He was still teaching at the time of his death," Shea said.
In "Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game" Landau plays a doctor, Dr. Abe Mandelbaum, who moves into a nursing home because of his wife, Molly (played by Shea), who has late-stage dementia that continues to deteriorate. Sorvino plays a gambler and womanizer whose ailments include diabetes and impotence, the latter a condition he has in common with Abe. Into the picture comes nurse Angela (played by Maria Dizzia) who has reason to believe that the father she has never met is one of the nursing home's residents.
"The idea came from a number of my experiences as a doctor," said Weiner. "It's a story of friendship, aging, sexuality."
Weiner had originally written a story version, but it was never published, he said. He previously wrote and directed the 2011 documentary "What Is Life: The Movie," a winner of four Los Angeles Movie Awards. A novel, "The Children's Ward," was published in 1980.
"I've always had this creative side to me," Weiner said. When he was in medical school he made videos of Beatles songs, he said. "But I loved medicine so much."
Still, his son, Ron Weiner, a television writer with experience in the entertainment industry, has continually offered encouragement to his movie-making projects, Dr. Weiner said.
After a process that included Landau and Sorvino being sent the script and liking it, Weiner was face to face with both acting veterans as a first-time feature film director. Both had different traits, with Landau liking to practice a scene while Sorvino is more impulsive.
"I can't say that I wasn't nervous," Weiner said. "After a few days we hit it off and it (nerves) soon dissipated ...
"I had a strong feeling about what I wanted to do. They were amazing. Very open. Very collaborative. They enjoy working together."
Shea heard about casting calls for "Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game" through an agency in Rhode Island. "I was told to report to Harvard Medical School," she said.
She auditioned in "a little seminar room. That was day one." Day two she was invited to a callback audition. "Day three, I was on the set," she said.
Working closely with Landau, "I was as starstruck as anyone else," Shea acknowledged. And also a little nervous in part because of her newness to filmmaking.
Landau's acting credits include the TV series "Mission: Impossible" and winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Bela Lugosi in the 1994 film "Ed Wood." He was an exponent and teacher of method acting, and his students included Jack Nicholson.
"He was always supportive. With grace he would just whisper these tips for me. I was getting coaching from one of the huge method acting legends of the 20th century," Shea said. "Between Martin and Howard I was very well treated."
She concurs with Weiner that Landau and Sorvino were "totally different stripes" but "the chemistry does work between them."
Shea had her own distinct challenges in playing a character with dementia.
"I guess there's no one who hasn't had a brush with Alzheimer's these days. There are two in my family," she said. "I channeled my late mother and my late sister."
As Molly, "I'm not really present and not really available. My frustration was, 'Wow, I'm working with Martin Landau, he's the father of method acting, but we never connected (as characters). I didn't understand anything he said.' "
Weiner does understand the subject.
"The topic of the aging brain is what he does in his paying job. I considered it high praise when we was pleased with my work," Shea said.
Weiner said that when attending screenings of the film he's been "very grateful and excited. People really react to the film."
The film has a distributor and expanded to 12 major markets last week.
"I hope that they're engaged," he said of audiences. "They enter a world where they realize that old people are like young people, and I hope they have an emotional experience — they laugh, they cry."
Being a doctor and a director are pursuits that can help each other, Weiner said.
"I think they actually do. As a director you have to make all these decisions. We have that happen all the time as a doctor. It really helped me as a director. In art and film you're looking for themes and certain truths, and that's something that translates into science."
Weiner said he's been working on two new film scripts — one "a medical thriller that starts off with a murder in a hospital," and a second about a doctor who has an "existential crisis."
"I can hope," he said about making them into movies.
But that doesn't translate into Weiner retiring from science to concentrate full time on film directing.
"Never. It's very clear I would not give up medicine," he said.
Contact Richard Duckett at richard.duckett@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @TGRDuckett.