Two Family House

"Two Family House" proves that the Sundance Film Festival audience sometimes makes mistakes. "Saving Grace," the last Sundance Audience Award winner to make its way to theaters, certainly deserved all the awards that could be heaped upon it. "Two Family House" also won the Audience Award, but it's not as enjoyable as the previous film. While "Two Family House" intermittently charms, it also raises issues that it won't discuss, its plot falls on the wrong side of the line between unrealistic and magical, and its irritating narration tends to undermine whatever emotional power the film can muster.

The setup itself is quite intriguing. On Staten Island in the early 1950's, Buddy Visalo (Michael Rispoli) buys and moves into a house with, but over the objections of, his wife Estelle (Katherine Narducci). Buddy wants to turn the bottom floor of the house into a bar and live in the apartment upstairs; Estelle predicts that the bar will end up another red entry in Buddy's long list of business failures. A more pressing concern is that people are living in the apartment upstairs, specifically a pregnant Irishwoman named Mary O'Neary (Kelly Macdonald) and her loutish, abusive, alcoholic Irish husband (yes, that's a stereotype). Buddy has to get them out of the apartment to get his dreams off the ground, but Mary's baby arrives the same day Buddy's eviction party does. Mary's husband skips out because the baby is (unexpectedly) mulatto, but Buddy is undeterred and kicks her out anyway. Later, however, guilt lingers in his mind, and Buddy has to figure out what his dreams are and how best he can realize them.

Writer and director Raymond De Felitta had an obvious problem when scripting this film: all of his characters experience profound emotions, but being of a less educated class than the people who watch independent films (by and large), they don't really know how to express said emotions with superlative eloquence. His solution: insert a narrator to express their emotions for them. This is a bad idea, both in concept and in execution. For one thing, these characters seem perfectly capable of expressing their dilemmas; Rispoli does an incredible job at communicating his character's pride, shame and longing with his character's limited vocabulary, and Narducci and Macdonald don't fare much worse. For another thing, the narrator speaks in a self-consciously academic, semi-smartass tone, so that phrases like "said actions being vague, but without a doubt, involving violence" coexist with characters who communicate mainly using very short words, expletives and racial slurs. The actors themselves are eloquent enough; they make the narrator superfluous, inappropriate and intrusive.

Speaking of those racial slurs, much of this film's discourse seems to be about Italians versus Irish, and everyone versus Mary and her mulatto child. These issues are perfectly realistic, but the film does not deal with the issues so much as use them for dramatic effect and then sidestep them. And frankly, despite the narrator telling us helpfully what everyone is feeling (or, perhaps, because of the narrator), the resolution of the film as a whole feels a bit pat and unearned. De Felitta tells us in so many ways that whorish Mary is really a hidden saint and sensible Estelle is really a castrating shrew that dramatic tension evaporates towards the end of the film. The climactic scene is executed well, but De Felitta can't put its outcome in doubt.

"Two Family House" evokes its period effortlessly, and the moments when De Felitta allows his characters to work without the narrator are often full of charm and pathos. It's not hard to see how an audience could find this film endearing. The fine camerawork and Rispoli's lip-synced but stylish "performances" of suave 50's music, to name two other nice attributes of this film, certainly don't hurt things. But even with outstanding performances from its actors and intermittent moments of beauty, the useless narration and the facile plot leave "Two Family House" feeling a bit empty.

Rebecca Chasan, one of my many superiors when I used to temp at the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, noted in response to this review that "Two Family House" is cute and sweet. And she's right. I wasn't real sympathetic to this one, but you still might like it. Becky's extremely smart, so take that into account.

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