BEFORE: OK, one down, 299 to go in this new Movie Year. Paul Borghese, the infamous director of "Four Deadly Reasons", carries over from "Narrowsburg". I've been planning a whole De Niro chain, I figured I'd get to it around Father's Day maybe - but starting the year off with "Narrowsburg" forced me to move it up on the schedule. And to think I felt bad about taking "The War with Grandpa" out of that chain, but I don't think I could have completed the 2022 chain without it. Or at least the year would have ended differently.
THE PLOT: The Manzoni family, a notorious mafia clan, is relocated to Normandy, France under the Witness Protection Program, where fitting in soon becomes challenging, as their old habits die hard.
AFTER: This is a bit like the ultimate "fish out of water" story - and I managed to get to a few of those in the closing days of 2022. "Mona Lisa" was a FOOW story, and so was "Withnail & I", really they're all over the place. One of the best ways to start off a story is to take a character, or a whole family of them, and take them to a place they're not comfortable, and then make the conflicts happen. "The Hundred-Foot Journey" did the same thing, it took a family from India and dropped them off in France, where they opened a restaurant and feuded with the fine-dining restaurant across the street. "Last Christmas", same thing, take a Slovenian (?) family to London, and follow up with them a few years later to see how they're doing.
So here we have an American family, headed by a father who left the mob and testified against them, in exchange for getting his wife and kids to safety in Europe. He left one family, and rediscovered another, but now comes the difficult task of staying in hiding for, well, the rest of their lives, moving from town to town every time a Mob hit-man figures out where they might be living. And things being what they are, and these people being who they are, keeping a low profile is quite difficult for them. Giovanni, the father, keeps getting into side businesses, which lead to arguments with the locals, and he chooses to settle those arguments with baseball bats, or whatever the European equivalent is, or maybe a hammer if there's one handy, and so their FBI handler keeps having to move them around to a new town every 90 days or so.
Meanwhile, after relocating from the Riviera to Normandy, his wife can't help herself but torch a store if she thinks the locals are looking down on, just for asking for something American like peanut butter at the store, daughter Belle takes it upon herself to beat up the first French teen to tries to touch her without consent, and his son Warren figures out on the first day of high school what everyone's game is, who the biggest bullies are, and how to take them down and run the school himself. Well, I guess high school is a bit like jail, on the first day you need to find the biggest kid and deck him if you're going to survive, he's not entirely wrong.
Mr. Manzoni, now going under the name "Fred Blake", is the worst of them all, though. First he sets to writing his memoirs on an old typewriter he finds in the new house. Oh, great, another film where we just watch somebody typing for hours while he narrates his life story in his head. Jeez, you'd think that screenwriters would know a few things about writing, but they somehow are the most clueless of all - nobody writes their first draft of ANYTHING on a typewriter. If you're old school, you write it out longhand, THEN type it up, and if you were born after the Korean War then you use a word processor. Why ON EARTH would anyone use a typewriter for a first draft, it's the ONE device that you simply CANNOT make corrections on? At least if you use a pencil you can erase things, and with a pen, you can cross stuff out, but on an old typewriter, forget it, unless you want half of the page to be covered in Liquid Paper. Why don't writers, of all people, understand this? It can't be that using a typewriter is "cinematic", because there's nothing interesting about watching someone type, so is it just for the clackety-clack sound? That's a poor reason to allow this part of your movie to not make any sense.
Anyway, typing up his memoirs is exactly what Fred, er, Giovanni, is NOT supposed to be doing. He's supposed to living quietly, off the radar, and writing something to expose the Mafia's secrets isn't going to help. But thankfully Fred gets involved in another hobby, trying to figure out why the water in his new safe house is running brown. But when the plumber arrives, and explains how they could replace all the pipes in the house at an enormous cost and maybe still not fix the problem, that's not what Mr Manzoni wants to hear, and the plumber ends up with some broken bones. Well, at least Manzoni was nice enough to take him to the hospital after his "accident". Then he sets his sights on the town's corrupt mayor and also the factory in town that might be letting chemicals get back in the water supply. Eventually, he gets results, but not without causing a few more "accidents". Well, at least he's getting out of the house.
Umm, did the citizens of Flint, Michigan ever try anything like this? I guess maybe there are no mobsters in Flint, because when all else fails, maybe there are a few city officials up there who need some bones broken. Just saying. (OK, I just checked - it seems like the Flint water crisis has perhaps been resolved - as of July of 2021, so that means it took five full years, and $400 million to inspect every water line in that city and replace over 10,000 lead pipes. Glad to see it got fixed EVENTUALLY, but it never should have gotten that bad in the first place.)
As bad as my NITPICK POINT over typewriters is, there's one here that's even worse. And I saw it coming a mile away - in order to create the main conflict for the film, the NY mobsters have to figure out where the Manzonis are hiding, because the hitman that was sent to kill them lost their trail after they left the French Riviera. So in order for the story to move forward, there needs to be a tip-off, some clue that gives away their location - what happens is that Warren, the son, has an assignment to write something for the school newspaper, and it needs to be in English (even though they're in France) and it needs to involve wordplay, and it's due in five minutes. Contrivances all around - first of all, the French people are very particular about their language, they speak French and they're proud of it - so WHY would a French teacher give out an assignment in English? (For that matter, why are most of the French people in this film speaking English all the time? There's one scene in the grocery store where French people speak French, then the rest of them speak English in the rest of the film. Bizarre.). Secondly, why would the teacher FORCE a student to write something for the school newspaper? Usually a high school newspaper is written by volunteers, students who have an interest in journalism or are looking for extra-curricular activities to impress college recruiters. On top of this, why would the SCHOOL newspaper be printed and sent to newsstands around town, like it's a real newspaper? Usually the material inside is of interest only to students, like what's going to be for lunch in the cafeteria next week, or who won the high school sports game.
Warren relates a joke that he remembers hearing at a mobster's barbecue back in NYC - and then there are two more incredible contrivances, one being that this school newspaper, which is 99% in French with ONE joke in English, would find its way, somehow, not just to NYC but also to the exact jail cell where the head of that NYC Mafia family is being held. Sure, they show it happening, but in all likelihood the path this newspaper takes is akin to a golf ball shot during the U.S. open landing on the moon. And then, come on, it's a JOKE, one that's probably been told a hundred times in the history of classical opera, you can't tell me that a joke that plays off the title of "Boris Godunov" was only told ONCE ever, at a mobster BBQ and no other time ever on Earth. So HOW does the mobster, after glancing for two seconds at an English joke in a French newspaper that somehow came to be around the wine bottle that he had smuggled into jail, instantly realize the location of where the Manzoni family is hiding? Sorry for the spoilers, but this is just plain unbelievably impossible. It's like seeing "Why did the chicken cross the road?" in print and from that, discerning where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.
Apart from that, there's some good material here, the interplay between De Niro and Tommy Lee Jones, for one. The irony of a character played by De Niro being invited to introduce an American film (because, you know, he's pretending to be a writer) and then having the film turn out to be "Goodfellas", a Martin Scorcese joint that you know, he was also in. What's odd is that nobody in the audience notices that he looks a lot like one of the movie's stars... And I guess in this alternate universe where De Niro is a mobster on the run, there's also a "Goodfellas" movie, but does that movie have De Niro in it, or somebody else? Where in the DeNiro-verse does this take place, exactly? Hell, there's probably a dozen little in-jokes and Easter eggs I missed, so I should go find a list of them now.
Also starring Robert De Niro (last seen in "The War With Grandpa"), Michelle Pfeiffer (last seen in "French Exit'), Dianna Agron (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), John D'Leo (last seen in "Unbroken"), Tommy Lee Jones (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Jimmy Palumbo (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Domenick Lombardozzi (last seen in "Freedomland"), Stan Carp, Vincent Pastore (last seen in "Tales from the Darkside: The Movie"), Jon Freda, Michael J. Panichelli Jr., Anthony Desio, Ted Arcidi (last seen in "The Equalizer 2"), David Belle, Raymond Franza (last seen in "Café Society"), Christopher Craig, Cédric Zimmerlin, Tonio Descanvelle (last seen in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Jonas Bloquet (ditto), Christophe Kourotchkine (last seen in "Taken"), Dominique Serrand, Serge Tranvouez, Mario Pecqueur, Oisin Stack, Annie Mercier, Florence Muller (last seen in "Paris, Je t'aime"), Come Levin, Camille Gigot, Vincent Claude, Robin Rafoni, Terron Jones, Dominic Chianese (last seen in "Cradle Will Rock"), Louis Arcella (last seen in "Our Brand Is Crisis"), Kresh Novakovic, Moussa Maaskri, Samira Sedira, Joe Perrino (last seen in "A Walk on the Moon") with archive footage of Larry Hagman, Linda Gray.
RATING: 6 out of 10 missing boxes (umm, yeah, whatever happened to them?)
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