Källa: salon.com
Författare: Charles Taylor
Datum: 2000-11-06
Two "Sopranos" actors and this unflinching story prove just how good indie movies can be.
Like the baby whose unexpected appearance sets the story in motion, "Two Family House" is a sweet little surprise package. For such a modest movie, it takes its share of risks. With no flash or showmanship to fall back on, none of the empty energy that can sometimes put across even a mediocre movie, "Two Family House" stakes everything on the quality of its observations. The movie rises or falls on its ability to persuade us that a simple love story set in 1956 Staten Island is something entirely fresh. "Two Family House" is small, maybe even a bit thin, but it's a movie, not some Sundance Institute project taking up screen time before appearing on "American Playhouse." Raymond De Felitta, the writer-director, is like a stranger in a neighborhood bar who offers to tell you a story that he swears will be worth your time and then actually delivers on his promise.
Part of the pleasure of watching the film is realizing just how it differs from the familiar slice-of-life it appears to be. De Felitta's hero, Buddy Visalo (Michael Rispoli of "The Sopranos" ), with his Fred Flintstone build and his contingent of saloon buddies, appears to be the sort of lovable working-class lug we've all seen before, a Ralph Kramden working the factory instead of the bus route. But there's more romance than bluster in Buddy. As Rispoli plays him -- which is beautifully -- the baby fat that still clings to Buddy might almost be emotional insulation. He moves a bit too slowly, talks a bit too softly, as if he were wearing his dreams like an aura. He holds those dreams close because none of them have ever come true.
Buddy has always wanted to be a singer. In a WWII talent show his crooning was good enough to get the attention of Arthur Godfrey, who told Buddy to give him a call when he got out. But Estelle (Katherine Narducci, also of "The Sopranos"), the hard-headed girl who waited for him, has no use for illusions. Without a trace of pity or shame, she tells her girlfriends that Buddy was born for failure the way some men are born for success. So when she and her mother insist that singing is no way to provide for a wife, Buddy caves in and heads to work in the factory. Eleven years later and a few ill-chosen ventures (taxi service, pizza delivery) along the way, Buddy is still working in the factories, and he and 'Stell are still sharing her old single bed in her parents' home, waiting every week for her parents to be distracted enough by Perry Como's half-hour show for them to have sex.
Buddy's latest venture is a crumbling house that he plans to renovate and open up a tavern on the first floor. The place is a dump, and for 'Stell, leaving the cocoon of her parents' home, a veritable prison. It doesn't look much better to Buddy's friends, who don't understand why he wants to leave his neighborhood to move to one where he'll have to serve Irish drunks. Buddy's immediate problem is O'Neary (Kevin Conway), the Irish drunk living upstairs in his new house, a scruffy freeloader just versed enough in the tenancy laws to know how he can manage to be months behind on his rent and not fear eviction.