Mac

John Turturro and his brothers go into business building houses. Turturro wants to build them properly, and drives his family nuts while he builds his first development rigt next to a dairy farm, which makes it seem impossible to sell the beautiful homes he builds.

It's a beautiful character study, based on a play that Turturro and Brandon Cole wrote while they were students; the role is said to have been modeled on Turturrro's father, who seems to have been a man who took pride in doing things right. Turturro accurately portrays him, passionate, hard-working, and occasionally ridiculous and even destructive. It's agreat performance with a fine cast.

Mac is a movie to prize if you are of Italian-American heritage, grew up or live near Italians, or want to look beyond the mobster cliché that surrounds them. It portrays Italians far more realistically than "The Godfather" -- a classic, but only concerned with a tiny fraction of Italian-American life -- as superior and extraordinarily hard- working artists, craftsmen, builders and family men, naive with money, awkward at sex, unprejudiced, and bewildered by women. It is funny, wistfully sad, compelling, sweet and powerfully LOUD. It is a treat of a movie, one of a string of small independent films to emerge out of the so-called "video auteur" age of the early 1990s. Its director and star, John Turturro, based the movie largely upon is dad and his own early years, and the film rings true with that kind of authenticity.

I think there's a tendency for actors who decide to direct their own movies to leave absolutely everything up to their colleagues, the actors, including driving the story. I couldn't tell if this film was scripted or improvised, but there's an awful lot of long, no-dialogue shots of faces and activity that don't advance the plot, what there is of it. A surprising amount of what dialogue there is, is in untranslated Italian-which didn't bother me, except for the fact that-again-it didn't advance the story much. After about half an hour of establishing 4 or 5 characters without much action or tension, I still couldn't tell where the film was going. It seems to be about holding one's work to high standards, but then what? No dramatic tension, no imbalance to resolve, no conflicts to keep track of. Two stars for good acting and competent staging; two stars for lousy script, absent directing, and nonexistent editing. I can't be accused of spoiling anything if I merely point out that this film left me plenty of time between dialogue and story elements to ask myself about the plot, the story, the acting, the characters...it didn't draw me in at all.

Boy, this is bad. It's as if Turturro, playing method as Barton Fink, had rapped out his own screenplay about "the common man" and somehow saw it get before the cameras. The opening few minutes are fine, but then goes downhill and doesn't recover. There's a vaguely sickening feel that Turturro feels this is some sort of Important Statement, as if he believed the fictional studio's hype and cast himself as an auteur, ready to deliver that Barton Fink feeling. An overlong, self-important mess.

I just joined imdb because I couldn't sit by and let someone denigrating this great film be the initial thing people see in its summary.

Mac is a film with shortcomings like any other but it does not deserve to be so summarily dismissed as that doogie fella does.

The 'story' behind the film is that it's based in part on Turturro's father, so that some scenes are accused of being 'overacted' isn't really all that surprising.

I won't give away the story at all, I'll leave it to you fine people to watch because this is one of those movies that damn well should be seen. I happened upon it by accident and felt very fortuitous for having nothing to do that evening.

I was immediately drawn into this well shot and acted out film. With the exception of the the surreal opening part everything is immensely believable and I felt very connected to the characters. I felt better for having watched it and that certainly isn't something you get with most things flushed down the Hollywood toilet for our consumption.