Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE FAMILY” My rating: C+ (Opening wide on Sept. 13)

Luc Besson’s queasy comedy “The Family” is noteworthy primarily for casting Robert DeNiro and Michelle Pfeiffer in roles that are a figurative continuation of characters they developed some years ago.

We meet the Blakes — Dad Fred (DeNiro), Mom Maggie (Pfeiffer) and their kids,  17-year-old  Belle (Dianna Agron, late of TV’s “Glee”) and 14-year-old Warren (John D’Leo) — after an all-night drive across France to their new home in a small burg in Normandy.

Actually, their name isn’t Blake.  It’s Manzoni. And it quickly becomes apparant that this is no ordinary family. 

Michelle Pfeiffer

Dad is a former Brooklyn wise guy who turned state’s evidence against his mob bosses.  Now the survival of  his brood is dependent on the Witness Protection Program and an exasperated, saddle-faced FBI agent (Tommy Lee Jones) with the double duties of keeping the “Blakes” safe from hired hit men and of protecting the rest of us from the family’s spectacularly criminal proclivities.

Robert DeNiro as a made man? That’s no stretch. The guy could play Fred Blake/Giovanni Manzoni in his sleep — though he thankfully doesn’t take the easy way out here. 

And Pfeiffer portrayed a Mafia wife in the 1988 hit “Married to the Mob.”  She’s got the sexy/dangerous attitude down cold.

So it’s kind of reassuring — in a weird way — to find them adopting personas with which we’re already comfortable. It’s like going to a rock concert and being treated to an evening of Nuimber One hits.

The screenplay by Besson and Michael Caleo devotes much time to demonstrating that while the Blakes have been taken out of Brooklyn, Brooklyn has not been taken out of them. They’re all too willing to beat the living crap (or murder outright) anyone who crosses them — shopkeepers, plumbers, classmates.  No wonder their FBI handlers are prepared at a moment’s notice to send them off to yet another safe house and new set of identities.

John D’Leo, Dianna Agron

Besson’s comedy of intimidation finds the Blakes dealing with a mandate to “fit in” — Dad Fred has decided that in his latest incarnation he will be a writer — while back in the States a small army of killers lay plans to rub out the family and collect a $20 million bounty.  It all ends in a hugely bloody shootout.

It’s a comedy, remember?

Yeah, well, that’s the problem. Besson, the creative force behind films as varied as “Subway,” “La Femme Nikita,” “Leon: The Professional,” “The Fifth Element” and the animated “Arthur and the Invisibles” — has always had a problem with pushing too hard.  To succeed, “The Family” needs to maintain a very delicate balancing act between amusement and revulsion. It never finds the right tone.

The film does often make us laugh, but it’s a black, bleak, desperate laughter, not the hearty kind. And as the film grows increasingly ugly — with countless innocents caught in the crossfire between the killers and their targets — it simply turns mean.

Not to mention improbable.  By what mandate does the FBI maintain operations on foreign soil?  Does the French government know about this? 

And what about the moral question, since no matter where the Blakes go, they leave gory collateral damage in their wake?  Every time the feds relocate the family they are signing the death warrants of civilians living nearby.  If assassins don’t get them, the Blakes will.

| Robert W. Butler