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.

 

Lady Bird: Truly soars

Lady Bird (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang

Well into writer/director Greta Gerwig’s accomplished filmmaking debut, the story’s protagonist is complimented — by her high school counselor — on the depth of feeling she expresses, in a college application essay, for the city in which she has grown up: a city from which she’s eager to escape.

As the high school senior prom approaches, Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan, left) brings her
mother (Laurie Metcalf) along when she tries out a series of dresses: an excursion that
takes place amid the organized clutter of Sacramento's massive Thrift Town store.

The city is Sacramento, where Gerwig herself grew up, and her film exhibits the same reverence. Indeed, I doubt Sacramento ever again will be the subject of such a heartfelt cinematic valentine.

Lady Bird can’t help feeling semi-autobiographical; Gerwig’s characteristic personality shines throughout, easily recognized from her starring roles in quirky indie dramedies such as Lola Versus, Frances Ha and Mistress America. Her filmmaking debut is both an engaging and painfully raw coming-of-age saga, and a respectful appreciation for the environment that shaped her as an artist.

A kiss on Sacramento’s cheek, and an earnest Thank You.

But that’s merely the narrative portion of Gerwig’s film. She also deserves credit for coaxing persuasively intimate performances from her stars: most notably Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf, who deliver one of the most tempestuous, complicated and deeply loving mother/daughter relationships ever depicted on camera.

The year is 2002, as the United States enters a new national mindset in the wake of 9/11. We meet Ronan’s Christine McPherson on the eve of her senior year in high school, which she’s horrified to discover will be spent at a Catholic school. She’s a rebellious young adult, with strikingly dyed hair and an insistence that everybody — even family members — refer to her as “Lady Bird”: a name she has given herself, as opposed to the one that was thrust upon her.

She has little use for her post-college brother Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues) and his girlfriend Shelly (Marielle Scott), both of whom share the small, cramped house which is all that Lady Bird’s parents — Marion (Laurie Metcalf) and Larry (Tracy Letts) — can afford. Lady Bird is deeply ashamed of living on “the wrong side of the tracks”; it’s one of the innumerable “slights” that she takes personally, and for which she — unjustly, and immaturely — blames her parents.

She’s a teenager, in every horrific sense of the term: stubborn, selfish, shallow, spiteful and short-tempered.