It’s been a while since director Martin Scorsese and actor
Robert De Niro have worked together. Since their first collaboration in 1973’s
“Mean Streets” they have reinvented the gangster genre, and with films such as
“Goodfellas” and “Casino” they raised the bar impossibly high. But through the
proxy of French action director Luc Besson (“Le Femme Nikita”, “Leon: The
Professional”),with Marty now on the side-lines as an executive producer, “The
Family” is merely a confused mobster comedy, with only a hint of the better
movie that it could have been.
Besson’s
company has always targeted American audiences with actors that they are
comfortable with and genres that traditionally do well in the states—best
exemplified by the massively successful Liam Neeson vehicle “Taken” and “Taken
2”. With this film, as if he had never
seen “Analyze This”, he tries to flip the mobster movie on its head and laugh
at the seriousness of the De Niro tough-guy image. However, Besson doesn’t
decide whether this film is a parody of the Scorsese thing or an homage. Either Way, it’s not particularly good at being
either.
De Niro
and Michelle Pfeiffer play Giovanni and Maggie Manzoni, a mobster marriage,
trying to raise their two teenagers Warren (Dianne Agron) and Belle (John
D’Leo). After Giovanni rolled over on his organized crime associates, he and
his family are moved to Normandy France by the FBI, under witness
protection. While having to carefully
avoid the watchful eye of their case-officer (Tommy Lee Jones) they must assimilate
into this foreign culture by making friends with the neighbors and by trying to
fit in school. Of course, being Brooklyn fish of water, their attempts at
discretion are compromised when Fred tries a little too hard to get the
plumbing fixed, Maggie blows up a grocery store, and their kids get caught up
in violent displays of passion, and black market wheeling and dealing.
It’s too
bad that sometimes it isn’t obvious when a script needs some revision until the
movie has already been made. While this
film ultimately doesn’t go anywhere, it had enough positive attributes to keep
me interested, even when I knew it couldn’t possibly pull together all of its
desperate parts. Structurally the
screenplay is a mess but the characters are well drawn and Besson gives each
member of the family a unique and somewhat engaging arc within the story. But when the plot starts to happen and the
characters begin to fulfill their narrative purpose, the movie loses itself in
muddled clichés and disappointing resolutions.
By the
end, Besson actually has the audacity to explicitly evoke “Goodfellas, a
gesture that doesn’t do this movie any favors. During the climax, when the
action gears up, the guns go off, and the genre starts to gravitate closer to
that sort of ambition, the “Goodfellas” comparison only makes it clearer where
the film falls short. What we end up
with is something genetically closer to a marinara soaked “Adams Family”.
More
egregiously, “The Family” isn’t as funny as it thinks it is or as vicious as it
needed to be. It rides the line between
being a dark satire and a broad farce but never really chooses a style, and in
wobbling back and forth between these two approaches it just becomes watered
down and tone deaf. The script is
chockablock with set-ups and the dialogue is filled with one-liners and punch
lines, but while these characters might have had me interested in their foibles
they rarely made me laugh, especially when they were trying to.
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2013
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