It's great to see Robert De Niro front and centre in a full-sized role again, even if we might wish it hadn't been this one. Likewise Michelle Pfeiffer, stepping up to play the hard-boiled wife of De Niro's mobster-in-hiding Giovanno Manzoni. Twenty-five years later, she's remarried to the Mob and giving it serious bada-bing.
With its twin (and legendary) leads in fine fettle, The Family might have been a shoo-in for the industry's various gong-circuses, but the fact is that it's only some hard peddling from Bobby and Michelle that keeps the thing airborne. It's directed and co-written by Luc Besson, and bears his hallmarks of conceptual overreach and cartoon ultraviolence.
It's a fun watch for about 70 percent of the time, but none of it makes much sense. Manzoni has been rushed into witness protection by the FBI after snitching on Brooklyn mobster Don Luchese. And where might that be - Idaho or Nebraska, Cleveland or Des Moines? Nope, the Manzonis (mom, pop and two kids) have been whisked off to France, where they fit in as unobtrusively as a Fourth of July parade parachuting off the Eiffel Tower. Unable to curb their criminal tendencies, they've been forced to relocate from the Côte d'Azur to the Normandy village of Cholong-sur-Avre (which doesn't sound all that French, when you think about it).
Now masquerading as the Blake family, they carry on regardless. Mom (now called Maggie) takes umbrage at the anti-American clichés spouted by the locals when she visits the neighbourhood grocery store, so she blows the place up. Dad (aka Fred Blake) jovially batters the lazy local plumber almost to death with a baseball bat, and does much the same to the boss of a local fertiliSer factory who he holds responsible for making his tap-water brown.
The kids are no better. Belle (Glee's Dianna Agron, pictured above) doles out disproportionate GBH to local boys who try to pick her up, and her brother Warren swiftly sets up his own network of protection rackets in the local high school. Yet, despite all this, and Fred's ridiculous attempt to pass himself off as an author of a book about the Normandy landings about which he transparently knows nothing, it's only the freakish journey of a French schoolkids' newspaper to Brooklyn that tips off the revenge-minded mobsters to the Blakes' whereabouts. Soon, a posse of pug-ugly hitmen in overcoats and homburg hats are off to Normandy with their violin-cases. Besson and subtlety have yet to be introduced (De Niro and Pfeiffer, pictured below left).
Had Besson been able to decide whether he was making Silly Fockers or Godfather IV, he might have been able to reap the full benefit of his very capable cast (Tommy Lee Jones is also aboard as the family's gruff FBI minder). As it is, the piece is split in half by its schizophrenic tone. De Niro has developed a relaxed knack for deadpan comedy, and uses it to great effect when he's able to (most notably in the brazenly self-referential scene at the local film club, where he gives a talk about Scorsese's Goodfellas). However, the jokes wilt in the face of the wildly excessive violence, so any warmth you may have felt towards the slapstick gangsters abruptly curdles into revulsion.
Maybe Besson should have paid more attention to Steve Van Zandt's TV series Lilyhammer, the story of a mobster in witness protection in Norway. It was no more realistic, but it applied a much surer touch to its comedy-drama mix. But perhaps there could be more in store from the De Niro/Pfeiffer pairing.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to The Family
