Parents sometimes lose their way, when it comes to an honest assessment of what’s best for their children.
As oft has been said, The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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| Leo and Angela (Ray Romano and Laurie Metcalf) are astonished — shocked, even — to discover that their painfully shy son has a girlfriend: a detail that he has failed to share with them. |
But while there’s plenty to chuckle at, this film’s overall atmosphere is more subtly tense, some of the relationships genuinely toxic.
Leo and Angela Russo (Romano and Laurie Metcalf) enjoy a simple but mostly happy life in an Italian-American enclave of boisterous family and neighborhood friends. Sunday dinners are a raucous ritual — laden with profanity-laced shouting and frequent breaking of balls — that includes matriarch Rose Marie (Karen Lynn Gorney); Leo’s father, Dominic, aka “Pops” (Tony Lo Bianco); Leo’s younger brother Frank (Sebastian Maniscalco) and his two adult sons, Luigi and Marco (Franco Maicas and Adam Kaplan); their younger sister Rosa (Deirdre Friel); Leo and Angela’s son, nicknamed “Sticks” (Jacob Ward); and Uncle Pete (Jon Manfrellotti).
Occasional larger-scale events — weddings, christenings and so forth — are even noisier affairs that take place amid the cheesy atmosphere of the laughably named Versailles Palace, where scores of families mingle, drink and dance to the enthusiastic chatter and platters spun by DJ Joey Bones (Erik Griffin, a total hoot).
Leo’s working life, however, is somewhat fraught. Although amiably content to be part of the family construction business alongside Pops and Frank, this involves tolerating an endless stream of emotional abuse from both. Frank has long been the “chosen one” in Pops’ eyes, and — as such — misses no opportunity to belittle his older brother; worse yet, Frank has raised his two sons to echo such sentiments whenever possible.
Maicas and Kaplan play them as obnoxious, under-educated thugs who probably grew up pulling the wings off flies.
Leo goes along to get along; he has long shrugged this off, in great part because he lives for Sticks’ weekly high school basketball games. Although emotionally withdrawn and painfully shy, the young man truly comes alive on a basketball court, where he has blossomed into a star athlete. Indeed, the first act features a superbly choreographed and edited — and tremendously exciting — season-ending match against the area’s top-seeded school.
It has long been assumed — mostly by Pops — that when Sticks finishes high school, he’ll join the family business like all the other Russo men. But a chance encounter with a sports scout (P.J. Byrne, in a brief but earnest part), following that game, dangles a different possibility before Leo: the chance of an athletic scholarship to a small university such as Pennsylvania’s Drexel.
Nor is this the evening’s biggest surprise. Leo and Angela are astonished to discover that Sticks has a girlfriend: the effervescent, irrepressibly buoyant Dani (Sadie Stanley), also blessed (cursed?) with eyebrow-lifting candor. In every way, she’s the total opposite of Sticks. And, when inevitably subjected to one of the Russo family Sunday dinners, her spunk both shocks and impresses.
This is a marvelous sequence, staged for maximum comedic discomfort: We expect the girl to be devoured, but she holds her own.
Following a meet ’n’ greet visit to Drexel, where the basketball coach says all the right things, Leo succumbs to the hope that Sticks will be able to escape the fate that ensnared him.
Then, unexpectedly, everything goes tilt. And what Leo does next crosses the line that separates encouragement from ill-advised meddling.
(And, goodness, it just gets worse and worse. We writhe in agony.)
This core storyline is supplemented by several equally engaging subplots. Angela, a cancer survivor, constantly worries that the dread lumps will reappear. Rosa, a late bloomer who never left the family nest, laments her inability to attract a man. Dani is burdened by an uncomfortable home life, where her wealthy parents rarely pay attention to her.
Then there’s the flirty behavior of Pamela Carmelo (Jennifer Esposito), the gorgeous widow whose house the Russos are renovating, and whose leading remarks in Leo’s direction are both flattering and awkward.
On the surface, Romano’s Leo is easygoing and almost defiantly upbeat: always seeking the best in any given situation. He quotes favorite scenes and bits of dialogue from 1976’s Rocky, to the long-suffering annoyance of everybody within earshot. But all of this conceals a man who has trouble being honest with himself, and shares his son’s inability to show genuine emotion. Romano’s gaze frequently betrays pain, from a lifetime of quietly taking crap from his father and brother; no wonder he lives vicariously through Sticks’ basketball prowess.
But while Leo keeps close counsel, Angela is hilariously unfiltered, in the manner of those who’ve emerged with a newfound what-the-hell attitude, after a brush with death. She’s suspicious of everything and everybody, immediately assuming — as one example — that Dani is a typical high school slut. Metcalf is marvelous, with respect to how she delivers a scathing remark while still making it funny.
As with Leo, though, Angela’s surface bluster masks genuine terror. She keeps it hidden most of the time, because macho louts such as Pops, Frank and his two sons aren’t about to react the way she’d need them to.
Stanley similarly rises to Dani’s challenging complexities. We initially admire the girl’s sparkle and moxie, and then — as things become complicated — we grieve for the position into which she has been placed. Dani becomes a tough sell; in lesser hands, we’d come to despise her, but Stanley keeps her sympathetic.
Credit also goes to Romano and Stegemann, for sculpting this young woman so carefully.
Friel’s Rosa is the quiet one, amidst all her larger-than-life family members. She seems to have sublimated her dreams and desires, but she radiates wistfulness; we want her to find a path that leads to happiness.
Manfrellotti’s Pete is more than a relation; he’s also Leo’s best friend, and the man who knows him best. Pete isn’t a jerk like the other Russo men; as a result, he’s able to confront Leo in ways that not even Angela can manage.
Romano brings events to satisfying — if unexpected — conclusions. And, as the end credits roll, we realize that he has once again worked that Everybody Loves Raymond magic: What initially felt like a familiar dive into bickering Italian-American dynamics, has become real, and left us feeling warm and fuzzy.
Even as we laugh heartily over the killer final line that Angela hurls.
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