Review: ‘The Family’

“Hey! Ooooo! We’re Italian-Americans over heryunh, and yer a buncha snobby Frenchies ovah there, and we are violent people who love our peanut butter and pasta dishes, cause we’re fat Americans and we’re of Italian descent, ooohhhh, fuhgeddaboutit!”

That’s “The Family” right there. Just a bunch of stereotypes shmushed together. But is it any good?

Nope.

But to be fair, it’s not really bad either. It’s so right down the middle of the road, it leans closer to forgettable than anything else.

Basically imagine if at the end of “Goodfellas” Henry Hill and his family get witness protection program relocated to Normandy, France, where cultures clash and hilarity ensues. That’s pretty much the movie, but instead of Hill we got some made up guy played by Robert De Niro, and he’s married to Michelle Pfeiffer and her fake Brooklyn accent, and they have a couple of high school aged kids who look nothing like either of them and one of whom is played by an actress in her 20’s. Tommy Lee Jones shows up to mumble his way through some scenes as De Niro’s government caretaker, the violence is kicked up to warrant an R-rating, and we’re off to the races.

Actually this movie has all the elements needed to make a good movie. The cast is actually quite good and the initial set up is kind of intriguing, but surely there was a lot more humor to be mined from the clash of cultures depicted in this film than “Americans are violent and crude and the French are lazy, bureaucratic and snobby,” but that’s pretty much the extent of the social commentary and humor in this movie (and presumably the book on which this movie was based, a book with a French title that translates in “Badfellas” in English, so while we shouldn’t base a book on it’s cover, we can at least make large assumptions based on the title, no?).

Now before we get into bashing this thing like it is some sort of piece of shit, which it is NOT, let’s get into some of the things that I did enjoy. For example I liked that the story is in part about how De Niro’s character decides to write his memoirs (on a typewriter, nonetheless) and part of his character becomes his self-discovery through writing, which I dig for selfish reasons (“Barton Fink,” bitches). And I do appreciate the attempts at humor in having an overly stereotypical American family entrenched in a very French society, a small town one nonetheless, and my favorite gag may have been when the American family throws a barbeque to integrate with the neighborhood, and a group of men from the town encircle Robert De Niro while he tries to get the BBQ grill going and they all critique his fire building skills, offering up their own various bits of advice, and this is very much something that we can imagine happening in many different cultures around the world, the very basic yet universal truth of men judging other men by their BBQ skills.

But the problem with this movie is that nothing is taken far enough, and nothing is explored beyond the surface details. It feels like this story was a first draft that never got punched up or polished, as everyone involved just thought it would be good enough to have violent Italian-Americans terrorizing a small French town with their boarish behavior (and even THEN, this is not explored nearly enough). And then the story tries to break off into little tangents about how the son is starting his own one-man criminal enterprise in his new school and the daughter has the hots for a college-aged professor-to-be and the dad is trying to fix the town’s water supply (don’t even bother asking about THAT last bit of ridiculousness), but none of these stories add up to anything, especially as the son and daughter were each setting out to do something quite radical and different at the very end of the story with their lives, only to quickly reverse and go back to the status quo when hitmen arrive in the town to try to kill them all.

The problem with this movie is that when it is all said and done, it does not seem to have much of a point outside of “Americans are boarish and funny, the French are snobby and funny, and family is important!” “The Family” just feels pointless.

This movie also does something that has been irritating me lately, as there is one scene in which this movie gets fourth-wall-breakingly self referential, and this kind of stuff has been happening more and more lately. Specifically, in “The Family,” there is a scene in which Robert De Niro’s character sits down with a bunch of people to watch a movie, but due to a mix up there is a change in the programming and they all end up watching “Goodfellas.”

Do you see what happened here? In a movie starring Robert De Niro, his character sits down with other characters to watch a movie starring…Robert De Niro. Did any of the other characters happen to look at the screen and then back to their American visitors and come to the realization that this guy sitting with them looks EXACTLY like Robert De Niro? This is just so stupid and infuriating. It’s like when a White House aide in Roland Emmerich’s “White House Down” points out during a tour that the White House was blown up by aliens…in Roland Emmerich’s “Independence Day.” Or how about this trailer for this new movie called “Grudge Match,” in which Sylvestor Stallone plays an old boxer who comes out of retirement for one last match, and they drop jokes in their straight up based on the “Rocky” movies (by the way, De Niro is in this ridiculous looking boxing comedy as well).

This is a shitty trend and I hope it stops soon. There is one thing to make subtle references to other movies, or to even homage or rip off (depending on your point of view) shots and sequences from other movies, but to call such direct attention to something so over the top obvious and corny does not do anyone any favors. I did not want to be reminded of “Independence Day” when I watched “White House Down,” I don’t want to see Sly Stallone play a boxer with remarkable yet unspoken similarities to Rocky Balboa, and I definitely don’t want to see a movie in which Robert De Niro watches one of his own movies and no one acknowledges this. So modern filmmakers, please…stop it.

Otherwise “The Family” is nothing more than the sum of its parts, all of which were obviously culled from other things. Not really good, but not really bad, but no one is going to remember this thing five years from now, you just wait and see.