Somewhere in Queens: Family strife writ noisily

Somewhere in Queens (2023) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for frequent profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang 

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.

 

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.

There’s a tendency, at first blush, to assume that Ray Romano’s new film — which he directed, co-wrote (with Mark Stegemann) and stars in — occupies the territory he mined so well during the decade-long run of television’s Everybody Loves Raymond. Comparisons are easy, given that the focus here also is on messy, complicated family dynamics.

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.