Sometimes a movie just doesn't know what it wants to be. "The Family" is one such film.
"The Family" follows a family of mob snitches in witness protection and meanders, carrying a lighthearted air that almost veers off into silliness. When it's time to finally get serious, we as an audience don't know how to react.
"Family" stars Robert DeNiro as a man who used to be known as Giovanni Manzoni, a member of a high-profile New York mafia family who turned state's evidence. He has since been on the run, shuttling from one European community to the next, attempting to outrun the mobsters who are chasing them. As the film starts, they are holing up in a small village in Normandy (that's France for the uninitiated).
Michelle Pfeiffer plays Gio's wife, given the fake name Maggie Blake, and Dianna Agron and John D'Leo play Belle and Warren, their children. They seem a little put off at having to start over every few months, but don't put up much of a fight about it.
The film spends a lot of time giving each member of the family a subplot but doesn't give them much time together. We see Warren setting up protections and running his own little games in his school, and Belle schemes for her own interests while Maggie indulges in a little revenge against snooty locals who insult her.
Gio has a team of feds watching and protecting his family, led by Robert Stansfield (Tommy Lee Jones). Another subplot sees Maggie cooking for them, perhaps to disarm them and allow them a little more freedom to roam.
With all of these introductions, we see little crossing over. It struck me that only more than halfway through the film do we see Belle and Gio interact by themselves, that I knew next to nothing about what Belle thinks about her dad.
What's more, while we know an inevitable showdown between Gio's actual family and his old one is coming, the method by which it actually happens is ..."unbelievable" isn't the word for it. "Incredibly convoluted to the point of ridiculousness" is a little more apt.
The leads seem perpetually sleepy, but Agron and D'Leo impress and even steal the show from their elders. They provide most of the big laughs, though a development with Agron's character late in the film seems out of character for her, though it's hard to tell because we barely get a sense of who these people are. They simply do one thing after another, and we rarely get a sense of whether they're scheming or just vulnerable at any given point.
The film's wanton violence underscores the film's lighthearted tone. We see gangsters casually mow down entire families — wives and (teen) children in addition to the collections of scumbags to whom they're hitched, which creates an inconsistency. Are we supposed to think their demise is darkly comic, or are we just not supposed to care about them?
The film's finale underscores that as well. In the screening, I attended people behind me were very loudly laughing at innocent people being mowed down by gunfire. I'm still at this point not sure if what I was seeing was supposed to be funny or not.