With a cast that includes Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Olivia Wilde and Michelle Pfeiffer apparently the “people like us” referred to in the title are all exceptionally good-looking persons. Just as the cast reflects a specific, unreal vision of real life, so does the script.
Chris Pine plays Sam a sleazy New York salesman who is on the cusp of being investigated for fraud. When his estranged father passes away he travels to Los Angeles only to confront his mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) and his father’s legacy—a daughter named Frankie (Elizabeth Banks) from a second, secret family.
This family drama has much going for it, but gets almost fatally bogged down by melodrama and the way the movie stretches out Sam’s inability to tell Frankie why he’s glommed on to her and son Josh (Michael Hall D’Addario).
To make up for the slow moving story director Alex Kurtzman tries to jumpstart the pacing with frenetically edited scenes that would seem more appropriate to an action film. I know Chris Pine is best known as the young Captain Kirk, but not all his movies need to be cut as though a fight is about to break out.
It’s too bad because at the core of the film is an interesting story, which is ably performed by the good looking cast (even if they are frequently saddled with long melodramatic, confessional speeches).
Pine proves he can do more than action pieces and Pfeiffer has a small, but complex part, but it is D’Addario who adds heart to the story. As Frankie’s troubled eleven-year-old son he grounds the movie, giving the viewer a reason to feel empathy not only for him but for Sam and Frankie as well.
“People Like Us” is an effective family drama, clumsily told.
In his long and storied career Robert De Niro has made some stone cold classics, won Oscars and made the saying “You talkin’ to me?” a standard punchline for impressionists and psychopaths everywhere.
He’s also made lots of movies like “The Family.”
They’re what I call “new roof” films. Every now and again actors take on work for reasons other than artistic. Say, for instance, when they need a new roof on their castle in the South of France.
“The Family” feels like one of those movies. He’s still Booby D, so he isn’t terrible, neither is his co-star Michelle Pfeiffer, who brings back fond memories of “Married to the Mob,” but the film teases us with visions of De Niro in gangster mode and let’s us down with a paint-by-numbers story.
It’s a basic fish out of water story with a gangland twist. The Manzoni’s, Maggie (Pfeiffer), Belle (Diane Argon), Warren (John D’Leo) and father, hit man turned stoolie Giovanni (De Niro), have spent years in the witness protection program, moving from place to place, overseen by an FBI handler (Tommy Lee Jones). Their newest home is a sleepy little town in Normandy where they try and fit in.
Trouble is, they don’t blend.
The kids take after dad. Belle is a bruiser who beats up her classmates and Warren runs rackets in his school hallways. Maggie has a way with explosives and Giovanni, well, let’s just say you don’t want to get one his bad side. They are living proof that “the family that slays together, stays together.”
Stateside the people he betrayed are on the look out for Giovanni and family with revenge on their minds.
In one of the film’s pivotal moments Giovanni attends a film club screening of (MILD SPOILER) of “Goodfellas.” The mere mention of Martin Scorsese—De Niro’s collaborator on eight films since 1973—only reinforces how lame this movie is. De Niro has a rapturous look on his face as he watches the movie in the movie, as though longing for the good old days when Hollywood still made good gangster pictures. Or at least mob movies that didn’t rely on stereotypes to sell the sadistic dark humor.
Before “The Family” turns into a bullet orgy, it contains a few tense moments but fails to deliver on the comedy or any fresh gangland drama.
I hope De Niro at least got a nice new roof out of the deal.
The world’s oldest profession has experienced an on screen revival of late. Steven Soderbergh’s film The Girlfriend Experience is a thoroughly modern look at the life of an escort while Cheri, the new film from Stephen Frears (of Dangerous Liaisons and The Queen fame) is a decidedly old fashioned take on the life of a lady of the night. Based on a 1920 novel by French author Colette it tells the story of the end of a six-year affair between a retired courtesan, Léa de Lonval (Michelle Pfeiffer), and an ostentatious young man, Fred ‘Chéri’ Peloux (Rupert Friend). When the relationship is over each must learn to go on with their lives. “Living with someone for six years is like following your husband to the colonies,” says Léa. “When you come back you’ve forgotten how to act and what to wear.”
The two films share a theme, the notion of what happens when people who sell themselves actually fall in love, but while Soderbergh’s take on the situation is up-to-the-minute with its references to Obama and the market meltdown Frears has taken a different path. His movie is not only set in the 1900s, but it feels like it was made in the 1900s; it feels old fashioned and staid.
The film is beautifully appointed—the sets, clothes and period details are bang on—but the acting style is stiff (with the exception of Kathy Bates, the only live wire in the cast), and the language a touch too courtly. For a movie about a courtesan it’s a bit too mannered.
The film has lots of problems. Firstly it breaks a cardinal rule of movie making: show me don’t tell me. A narrator (the voice of director Frears) pops up now and again to clumsily fill in the details sadly lacking in the film’s storytelling. When a narrator is needed to keep the momentum moving forward something is amiss.
Secondly affairs of the heart are unpredictable things, but Léa and Chéri are so self absorbed that their dangerous liaison never comes across as interesting. Their emotions are on the surface with no real depth. It was a repressed time but the film presents it and its characters as vapid rather than simply reserved.
If the story was more interesting those faults could be forgiven but the real killer here, the thing that drags the whole movie down is the casting of Rupert Friend as Chéri. There is love sick. There’s morose and then there is whatever Friend is trying to convey here. He turns Chéri into such a doleful wet rag it’s hard to imagine that anyone would want to spend a minute in the same room with him, let alone surrender their heart.
Pfeiffer fares better, wringing some emotion from the affected script and bringing sophistication to the character but is undone by an underwritten story.
Cheri is a minor work from a major filmmaker and talented cast.
With a cast that includes Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Olivia Wilde and Michelle Pfeiffer apparently the “people like us” referred to in the title are all exceptionally good-looking persons. Just as the cast reflects a specific, unreal vision of real life, so does the script.
