Screened Out: The Family

[one-star-rating]Robert DeNiro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tommy Lee Jones, Dianna Agron, John D’Leo[/one-star-rating]

The Family could be one of those great, terrible movies for teaching students lessons about tone and consistency. Because it has none. Sometimes, your only purpose in life is to stand as a dire warning to others. The Family does this as a film.

French director Luc Besson aims to take De Niro’s reputation acting as a mobster and turns it into crass, violent, puerile comedy – meaning The Family means to degrade great actors and their past work. De Niro signed up for it, along with Tommy Lee Jones and Michelle Pfeiffer. Why?

De Niro and his family (Pfeiffer, Agron, D’Leo) are an ex-Mafioso gang sent to live in France under witness protection. They try to settle into their provincial setting, but they soon revert back to old ways. The wife torches a store, because a clerk embarrassed her. The son is a small-time con at school. Their inability to lie low frustrates Jones, hired by the US government to keep the vicious family alive. It also draws all their enemies to France to take out the family.

The Family wants us to laugh at little things, like the stereotypical snobbery of the French people. Then we’re meant to chuckle at yet another discussion of the various meanings of the f-word. Finally, we’re supposed to guffaw at someone’s nose quickly and severely being removed from his face, the blood and viscera flying. Hilarious.

This is supposedly comedy, but the humor is juvenile, the violence is particularly gratuitous and mean, and there are more plot holes than unmarked graves in the family’s backyard. Nobody here is an adult, except Jones, who seems masochistic, stupid to have even taken the assignment.

Is being overtly cruel supposed to be funny? Does slitting throats and bashing heads with bats fill you with the giggles? Besson – who also cowrote the script – thinks it should.

Besson is a much better person than this; his proof in in films like La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element, and The Professional. The Family is demeaning and spiritually gross.

I’m amazed anyone thought this was funny. In fact, I laughed once – when De Niro, passing himself off as a screenwriter, is asked to explain GoodFellas to a French film society.

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Mostly, it’s sad to see De Niro poking holes into his mafia-film legacy (just as it was painful to see Pachino and Walken in the unspeakably horrible Stand Up Guys earlier this year.) De Niro cannot lose himself in the role, though he tries. It’s his past in better mobster films that makes the grossness and unevenness of The Family discomforting.

So, here is a film about Brooklyn types trying to rectify their cultural history with the more effete French. That’s mashed up – literally – with a gory, bloody film about murders, assassinations, mutilations, and torture. Oh, and to tie this all together, let’s throw in familial love. Now, laugh, because this mess is supposed to be, overall, funny and not at all tragic.