Robert De Niro’s batting average fluctuates wildly. Many years
ago, he was doing one stellar movie for every two movies made. Nowadays he’s
averaging a homer about once every three at-bats. He’s a star, no doubt, but he
swings at too many pitches.
Now, to follow this baseball analogy through to its end, The Family is not a grand slam, although
it’s certainly the wildest inside-the-park homerun you’re likely to see for a
very long time.
This is a strange, strange movie. So strange that I find myself
at a loss for what it really is. At its heart, it’s a gangster movie, with De
Niro doing his trademark mobster routine like a salty old pro. But it’s also a
relationship drama about a Brooklyn family
struggling to tough it out in the FBI’s witness protection program. There are
subplots involving the water company and his daughter’s handsome teacher,
monologues about olive oil and peppers, a curios middle section in which De
Niro’s mobster-in-hiding plucks away at his memoirs in a greenhouse and a
surreal scene at a film debate that turns absolutely bonkers.
Also, the whole movie takes place in Normandy ,
France , miles away from
where American soldiers blasted their way into Nazi-occupied Europe .
The setting seems odd, until The Family
features its own military invasion late in the movie.
De Niro plays Giovanni Manzoni, an Italian gangster in hiding
after he turned state’s witness for the FBI. He’s a rat, though not a proud one
as he is unceremoniously shuffled from house to house, often in his scruffy
robe, under the protection of his FBI handler (Tommy Lee Jones). The feds set
the family up in a quaint cottage in Normandy ;
their cover is that Giovanni, under the name Fred Blake, is an author writing
about D-Day, a subject which the town’s residents have a deeper more nuanced understanding
of.
After living a life of crime, this family doesn’t mess around.
Fred’s wife, Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer) is rebuffed at the local market when
the French store clerk laughs at her request for peanut butter — “This is why
all Americans are fat,” he says with an upturned nose. She does what any
red-blooded American mob wife would do: she burns the grocery store down.
Meanwhile, Fred’s teen children, Belle (Glee’s
Dianna Agron) and Warren (John D’Leo), hit the high school with a vengeance:
Belle assaults three people on the first day, including one with a tennis racket,
and Warren sets
up an extortion and bribery business that yields surprising results. Apples don’t
fall far from the tree in this family.
While his wife and kids rip through the town, Fred shambles
around the house plotting his next move. He has to be careful, though, because
his old mob family still has a price on his head for ratting them out. The
first order of business is to bury the seafood salesman in the garden. He tried
to inflate lobster prices on the wrong guy, so Fred killed him. This is our
first taste of violence, and it won’t be the last. Later, when he decides his
water is coming out of the tap a little too brown for his liking, he takes on
the town’s plumber, the mayor and the fertilizer plant owner. “We’re not in Brooklyn anymore,” Maggie tells him.
De Niro has done these gangster roles before, so it’s no surprise
that he can do this one — a mash-up of his characters in Goodfellas and Analyze This
— so well. De Niro’s performance is lazy and tired because poor Fred, beat up
in this FBI program, is entirely defeated. De Niro’s meta-performance winks at
us from behind those sad eyes because it knows we have seen the films it’s
referencing. It will remind many people of The
Freshman, Marlon Brando’s awful gangster movie that assumed its audience
and characters had all seen The Godfather.
The Family doesn’t
invoke The Godfather — don’t forget,
De Niro starred in the sequel — but it does have a wonderful scene in which
Fred/Giovanni is asked to debate a movie at his town’s local film club. The
film: Goodfellas. All the FBI handler
can do is roll his eyes. When it comes time for Fred to discuss the film, he
can either play dumb or gush about the mob life in exorbitant detail. Guess
what he does.
De Niro is impressive here, but so are the actors playing his
family, Pfeiffer especially. Her Brooklyn
accent floats in and out, but she plays the mob wife with such a feisty zest
that you’ll hardly notice. Agron, usually confined to Glee’s two bland chords, finds some different notes to play here as
the teenager with the dangerous crush on her teacher. D’Leo, a relatively new
face, is also electric. His teen character has a recurring gag about swearing
in front of his parents. “We’re not in Brooklyn
anymore,” his mother says again.
The Family is a sharp
comedy, maybe too sharp for its own good, which is why the whole thing was
destined to end in a hail of gunfire and violence. I should have seen this
coming, mostly because the movie is directed by French action auteur Luc Besson
(La Femme Nikita, The Professional). With Besson, creator
of the Transporter series, of course
this has to end with hitmen unpacking crates of silenced machine guns, tactical
shotguns, military-style assault rifles and bazookas. Of course they all have
to unload on Fred’s beautiful villa. Of course a swath of mayhem must be cut
through this beautiful town and its quant inhabitants.
The violence is especially cold and heartless, even for a comedy
this dark. Women, children, teens, police officers, firefighters … no one is
spared. In the big battle sequence, Fred’s neighbors, who we’ve come to know through
the course of the film, all pop out of their gates to see what the commotion
is. The mobsters kill them all one by one. Yeesh.
Aside from the violence and some meandering segments in the
middle, I rather enjoyed The Family
and its snarky characters. The dialogue is especially witty, even as it
descends into a swear-a-thon and then into De Niro’s vast library of mob-isms.
You’ve seen this De Niro performance before, but never like this, and that is
the film’s charm.
