Negocios de familia

Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, and Matthew Broderick play an unlikely combination of grandfather, father and son in a family held together more by larceny than love. It might be little more than a miscast Hollywood star package gift-wrapped for the holidays, but the otherwise routine caper scenario is given added depth in the script by Vincent Patrick ('The Pope of Greenwich Village'), showing his affection for offbeat New York City characters and allowing a full hour of screen time before the big heist to establish each relationship. Young Broderick idolizes crooked granddad Connery, forcing a reformed Hoffman to reluctantly accompany them on one last job, to protect his overeager, amateur son. The fun and games end when the robbery begins, but under the typically efficient (if unstylish) direction of Sidney Lumet the film never quite sinks to the expected level of melodrama, despite going for the sentimental chokehold in the final scenes.

Jessie McMullen (Sean Connery) is a professional thief. His son, Vito (Dustin Hoffman), is a reformed thief who got involved in some theft apart from Jesse when he was a very young man, did time, and has been doing very well in the meat packing business though it is an occupation he hates. He has sworn that his son would get the chance to do what he loves, and so Adam (Matthew Broderick) is on the threshold of getting a master's degree in biology and seems to have a bright future ahead. It seems to be something he is passionate about.

But then Adam just drops out because the future looks all too safe and instead decides he wants the excitement of a burglary that has the potential for a big payout. Adam offers to let both Jessie and Vito in on the deal. Jessie accepts. Vido says no initially, but then decides to go along mainly to protect his son, Adam, because he knows he is completely green about such things. Complications ensue.

I think I understood Jessie and Vito, as to where their characters are coming from. Jessie is a hard guy straight out of The Asphalt Jungle who thinks "crime is just a left handed form of human endeavor" to quote said Asphalt Jungle. Vito just wants a better life for his son than he had. But Adam is a whiny selfish brat who does not appreciate what his father is trying to do for him at all. And he never has an epiphany at any point.

There is an odd situation that the film puts forth - Jessie and his girlfriend as well as Adam and his girlfriend are eating dinner at Vito's house. The girl Adam is dating, played by Victoria Jackson, reveals a way she has of cleaning up on real estate. She has a connection at Sloan Kettering who tells her who the really sick patients are so she can be the first to bid on their apartments since they usually die or are too ill to continue living in their homes. This disgusts Jessie, who has some kind of sideways morality that seems to include that it is not nice to steal from sick people or people who are down, but if they are doing fine stealing from them is AOK. If this is supposed to make me admire Jessie, it really doesn't do it for me.

And that is what this film lacks - somebody - anybody - to root for. You'd never guess going in that a film with Lumet directing and Connery, Hoffman, and Broderick acting would land with such a thud, but you'd guess wrong.

What does it do right? It has some great scenes of working class New York City as it existed around 1990. From the 80s forward, to watch most American films, you'd think everybody in New York City lived in a professionally decorated tony brownstone.

Connery, Hoffman, Broderick, oh my! OK, it should have been an Oscar contender, but it wasn't. Vince Patrick's work will never rival Tolstoy, but it isn't intended to. This is classic Connery chewing scenery with acid tongue dialogue and more than a few memorable moments. Hardly a talent waster, lets call it an under achiever, just like the main characters here.

Besides the three main characters reading like the beginning of a bad joke: "A Jew, A Sicilian and a Scot walk into a bar..", this is not a terrible movie.

Connery, Hoffman and Broderick all were mis-cast. Connery just does not look like a con man: He looks like the president. Hmmm. Maybe a bad analogy.

Why not get three people who look somewhat similar, maybe like Nick Nolte, Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater?

So, as I said, this movie is not god-awful. It is rather good, but there are one or two major complaints I have:

Why is Broderick's character (Adam) angry at his father (Hoffman as Vito) after Vito turns himself in to the police.., since Adam was the one who got him involved in the first place?!

Why does Vito apologize to Adam towards the end, when it should have been the other way around?

There is an inconsistency in the plot, too: The judge would have thrown the book at Adam, not his grandfather (Connery as Jessie), once they realized that he was recently a graduate student of molecular biology, and obviously the brains and impetus of the caper.

Jessie was infuriatingly arrogant and persuasive, and I was not sorry to see him go to the slammer. Vito should have gone head-to-head against Jessie, in an attempt to save his son from a life of crime and/or punishment. Now THAT would have been worth watching.

I'm not even going to ask how the Jew, the Sicilian and the Scot became Irish. McMullen? Anyone?

Looking back now, we can say that this is the kind of films Hollywood should be doing now. Put together three big stars from different generations and make a good film about a good subject; in the case of "Family Business" about a family united in criminal activities. A material like this could rescue the career of many veterans actors.

In 1989, having Sean Connery (after Oscar for "The Untouchables"), Dustin Hoffman (right away for his Oscar in "Rain Man") and Matthew Broderick (still on the wave from hits like "Biloxi Blues" and "Ferris Bueller Day Off") as the cast from this film directed by Sidney Lumet was solid gold, a real bait to attract audiences, and even know when you hear that those talents were together in a picture you rush away to see it. Those are the expectations but expectations always differ from reality. Given a better script these could be a better picture than it is, more memorable.

"Family Business" tells the story of three generations of a problematic Jewish family involved with robberies. It starts when the bright college student Broderick (Hoffman's son and Connery's grandson here) decides to get involved in a sure thing business related to robbing a laboratory and he calls for his family to help with. But all of this triggers a crisis among father and son and grandfather, when Hoffman's characters wants at all costs protect his son for doing this, he doesn't want his son to get caught and arrested while Connery thinks they must do it, because nothing can go wrong. From here, the movie is more about family issues than dangerous and illegal activities.

It lacks substance to this being a great film, it lacks something to make us involved with their problems. The main problem was the that there were times when the film required of its viewers a certain seriousness but when we knew this was also a comedy. It gets stranded in never being really funny and never being awfully dramatic as some situations tend do be. The good news about this project is that Sean Connery has an incredible timing for comedy, his punchlines were amazingly funny, not to mention that his character is very problematic yet very amusing. His best scenes are when he defends himself on court for beating a policeman and when he beats another prisoner during their transfer, to what the guard asks what happened and the other prisoners reply "He felt!"

A path should be decided by the writers in what type of film they were looking for, a goofy comedy or a powerful drama about family relations, and that was a deficiency that almost ruined the film for me. Regarding the most awaited moment of this, the robbery was pretty good, funny and tense at the same time but the whole situation involving Broderick's arrest was poorly made, unconvincing that he couldn't run away and cross the street to his family car or run to any other direction when it was clearly enough that the police wasn't so close to him, that scene is bizarre. One final complaint: the soundtrack was totally wrong for this film, hauntingly dramatic.

What makes me like of this film, except the reunion of stars involved even though they're not at their best and they are somewhat mediocre, is its way of showing us the importance of family and caring about them whether through good times or bad times. When it comes down to present how Hoffman suffers for his son, wants the best for him, is when the movie really hits the target, family is family and business are business and sometimes they should not be mixed, otherwise is problems to both sides. And that's the ruin for everyone involved.

A good film from the 1980's, deeply flawed but completely watchable. I'm positive that Lumet has better than this. 6/10