Sunday, June 16, 2019

Welcome to the Rileys: James Gandolfini, Kristen Stewart, and Melissa Leo Shine



“Welcome to the Rileys” presents a very American-style movie which seems almost from a different era.  It kinda’ is, considering  that in the speed-of-light movement of media in 2019,  a film from 2010  seems light years behind the times.  

In the   incessant parade of Marvel Comics inspired  sequels, prequels, and whatever other money-drubbing special effects   eyeball candy is drummed into audiences, “Welcome to the Rileys” is a window to a world of loss, patience, compassion, and possibly redemption. 

The independent film project is so archaic that it relies on superb acting by the late James Gandolfini, Kristen Stewart, and Melissa Leo to make its story engaging.  Nothing explodes, rockets into the air, crashes (unless you count human ones), or bleeds profusely (except when one of Mallory’s tricks smacks her around because he’s not happy with the sexual services she’s expected to provide),    “He tried to stick it up my ass,” she tells Doug, who is glad there is one vice Mallory does refuse to engage in.

Doug is the proprietor of a successful plumbing supply chain.  Lois is his wife.  And ‘Mallory’ (who goes by several aka(s) is a . . . .
1)     teen-age prostitute
2)     stripper
3)     orphan runaway from Florida
4)     substitute daughter to fill an empty space

There’s a lot of concentrated dissonance in the lives of Lois and Doug.  Since the death of their daughter Emily in a car accident, the couple has been locked into separate emotional boxes.  Lois has not left the house for years, not even to walk down her driveway to the mailbox.  Doug bides his time through business and an ongoing affair with a black waitress at a local diner.

It’s when Doug goes to a plumbers convention in New Orleans that he meets Mallory in a strip club where he’s gone to hide away from his obtuse conventioneer pals.  He refuses everything she offers beginning with a lap dance, and then graduating to just about everything else.  “Except anal, I don’t do anal,” Mallory says.   

It takes her a good long time to realize Doug is a real live human being and a generous one to boot.  Mallory is quite a beautiful mess with her tangle of hair, sharp features, halting bird-of-prey eyes darting around.  There are a couple of camera shots where you realize Doug may be a better man than you are.   Not having seen Kirsten Stewart in those fantasy flicks, I wondered if that was a body double climbing onto Doug’s lap in the seedy private room of the strip club. Yikes, there was one shot where I’d definitely lose my religion — but not to digress.

  Doug decides to take up permanent residence in the claptrap rooms where Mallory lives.  He calls wife Lois to tell her he won’t be home for a while.  She’s so numb with shock and loss that it hardly registers.  Weeks pass and finally Lois crashes out of her torpor and goes to look for her husband.   It’s all new to her – getting into the car, actually driving, rediscovering the outside world — but at least it’s a beginning.  Or it could be an ending the way she drives, confusing reverse for a forward gear.  So then you have Lois, Doug, and Mallory living together in a ramshackle apartment in a rundown part of New Orleans.

Of humor there are only short precise snatches.  Because it’s all very sad and heartbreaking.  It’s not the kind of pain you can easily shuck off.  It’s a familiar kind of pain that has you caring fopr Doug, and Lois, and Mallory.
 
Okay, so  being the discriminating film watcher that you are, and having seen some of this in RL, you know that Mallory (and it could be any drug addict, child prostitute, teen alcoholic, or serial loser in your life circle) cannot suddenly change into that wholesome mid-western fairy princess to fill that huge hole in the lives of Doug and Lois.

But she can deliver on a ray of hope.  If the film stumbled in a few spots, you quickly forgot about it, so engaging were the actors, and so human the story. 


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