About My Father
Sebastian Maniscalco is comedian I first encountered fifteen years ago, when he got his own episode of Comedy Central Presents. I loved it, and still think about a few key bits all the time. When I got to see a live taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart a decade ago, he was the warm-up comedian. All of which is to say I’ve been a fan for a while, despite having missed his more recent stuff. So it’s been nice to see him showing up in some movies lately. Most recently, he popped up in the excellent Somewhere in Queens, albeit in a small supporting role. So for him to get his own whole movie here is great.
Too bad it’s awful.
About My Father sees Sebastian (playing a fictional version of himself) planning to planning to propose to Ellie (Leslie Bibb). The catch is that he wants to use his deceased mother’s ring to do so, and his father Salvo (Robert DeNiro) refuses to relinquish it until he’s convinced Sebastian isn’t making a mistake. So Sebastian invites Salvo, a working class immigrant, to join him and his fiancé at her rich family’s vacation house for a weekend getaway. And oh boy, do sparks fly as cultures clash!
As that last line might imply, this is not a particularly creative movie. In just about every instance, the comedy takes aim at the easiest possible joke. The characters are broad stereotypes and caricatures (especially the brothers; we’ll get there), and the plot is as cookie cutter as it gets. Immigrant parent clashes with rich family of the significant other? Sure, that plot can be done well. It’s just…not here. It has two observations which are opposite sides of the same coin: these people are weird, and his dad is embarrassing. And it just hits those points various different combinations for all 90 minutes.
The closest to an interesting plot choice they make is that at a particular point, Salvo decides to flip his attitude around and be a ray of sunshine instead of a miserable bastard. But it doesn’t yield any further insights or humor. Well, it leads to “humor” which misses the mark quite hard. It really just further annoys Sebastian, which leads to a big fight preceding the climax. So it pushes the story further down an already predictable and uninteresting path. At every opportunity to deviate and catch my attention, it stayed the course, and never piqued my interest once.
For example, the brothers. One is a parody of the young republican businessman, and one is a parody of a hippy-dippy liberal arts degree holding New Age guy. If the movie has the instinct to pull back on them, maybe they could have been used to make some sort of point. But as it is, they’re just insufferable in the way that basically no one acts like this. Well, the businessman brother is more realistic, but still a doofus. So the movie creates them to be the softest, easiest punching bags imaginable. Which…why? It doesn’t say anything, nor enhance or help the characters. It’s just nothing.
Sebastian didn’t seem to have the confidence or self-esteem to really make fun of himself here. Sure, he was the butt of some jokes, but they were pretty broad, and really said absolutely nothing about him. For example, his bathing suit falling down while using the hoverboard thing. Even some of that got undermined: he starts out getting owned at tennis by Ellie and Tigger, before deciding he doesn’t care what his dad thinks and immediately destroys them. It seems like most of the jokes at his expense were calling himself unmanly. Which…okay, I guess that’s an approach. It’s just a weak one. As is treating most of the characters as mouthpieces for his sense of humor. The characters voices mostly flattened into his own.
The constant narration really didn’t help anything. Ugh. Heavy VO can work, but is usually a bad idea, and this demonstrated why. It’s often added after the fact because someone isn’t confident the audience will be able to follow what’s going on. I get the sense some of this was planned, like him relaying his family’s history, none of which mattered one bit more than “my father is an immigrant”. But there was also a lot of overexplanation of events on screen, and a refusal to let moments breath or sink in at all. It was distracting without adding anything.
And then there are the dropped setups. For example, there’s some weird tension between Tigger and Salvo, which I think is supposed to be resolved by her asking him to cut her hair? The whole thing with the peacock is left hanging. As is Sebastian’s reaction to Lucky and Ellie’s relationship. And a bunch of other small things I’ve already forgotten about.
DeNiro is clearly having some fun, that’s for sure. Too bad they didn’t write an interesting character around that, and instead a rote and predictable everyman. The rest of the cast is at best fine. It’s not their fault they’re in a bad film, but they failed to elevate the material.
Maybe this works if you’re a huge Maniscalco fan, but otherwise, I’d highly recommend you skip it.