Negócios de Família

I've got to learn to stop believing the studio-generated hype on movie jackets. To look at the summary, Family Business would appear to be a comedy...."laughs and larceny!" Whoever thought this movie is funny has a weird sense of humor. For me, it did not achieve even black comedy status. A couple of gaping holes in the plot almost made me eject it from the player. Were it not for the star power and consummate acting of Hoffman and Connery, I wouldn't have made it through to the end. And it may have been the first time for both of them to play characters we never really get to know. Broderick is wasted on a character that whines throughout the story. Glad I didn't pay full-tilt admission at a theater when this was first released.

Good acting. I was quite surprised with the end result. Three blockbusters with an excellent supporting cast.

Seeing that this was Connery and Hoffman, billed together with Broderick, I was expecting a real thriller. Ouch! Sitting way out in the audience, even I had to think. This film is a brain-teaser from start to finish, and gently plucks at the emotions. When you rent it, or go to see it, pay attention.

A criminal family, torn between right and wrong? How could this be?

Cute, innocent Victoria Jackson, as Christine, plays Matthew Broderick's, Adam's, fiancée, and is revealed to be someone even lower than this three-generation family of thieves.

Fascinating, ironic, clever, well done . . .

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?