'R Xmas

Plot

Cult favorite Abel Ferrara directed and co-wrote this story set in New York City in 1993, before Mayor Rudy Giuliani's much-publicized crusade against street crime put a dent in semi-public drug dealing in the city. It's a few days before Christmas, and a Latin American couple living on the city's Upper East Side (Lillo Brancato Jr. and Drea de Matteo) are watching their daughter (Lisa Valens) perform in her school's holiday pageant. Afterward, the couple drop the child off with a babysitter and set out to run some errands. They have two items on their agenda: get their daughter the doll she's been asking for (a nearly impossible task, since the toy has become the must-have item of the season), then head to their work space uptown, where they prepare and package heroin for street distribution. While the wife has her qualms about the ethics of drug dealing, both she and her husband know there's plenty of money to be made in heroin -- more than most Hispanic immigrants could make working legitimate jobs in New York -- and the business has been highly lucrative for them. The couple discovers one of their lower-level dealers may be talking to the police, but they soon have a bigger problem to deal with when the husband is lured to the Bronx by a fence who can get him the toy he's been looking for. The husband finds he's been lured into a trap, and a kidnapper (Ice-T) gives the wife less than a half hour to collect and pay a huge ransom, or her husband will be killed. As in Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, the audience never learns the names of most of the major characters in 'R Xmas; also like Bad Lieutenant (as well as King of New York and The New Rose Hotel), Ferrara invited pioneering gangster rapper Schooly-D to contribute to the film's score. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Review

Abel Ferrara's 'R Xmas somehow adds up to more than the sum of its script and performances. The intricately mundane workings of the drug trade make for fascinating cinema, and Ferrara's conflation of rabid, upper-class consumerism with narcotics dealing is pointed and well wrought. The Christmas setting of the film adds an effectively blunt irony to the proceedings. The film was expertly shot by longtime Ferrara collaborator Ken Kelsch, though the incessant use of dissolves may irritate some viewers. The silly (seemingly improvised) dialogue and sloppy plotting that surround the film's solid core make it seem as though the filmmakers are making it up as they go along. Drea de Matteo, as the wife/partner of an embattled Dominican drug dealer, and Ice-T, as her husband's kidnapper, have a fiery energy in their scenes together, but the content of their interaction is ludicrous. For example, the kidnapper simply demands "a lot of money" for the husband's safe return, and then gets angry when the wife returns with an insufficient amount. Lillo Brancato Jr., meanwhile, as the aforementioned husband, is believably dopey as an ineffectual drug kingpin, but the Italian-American actor's effort to portray a Dominican often resembles a bad Al Pacino impression. But there is a worthy story with a message at the center of all this, and Ferrara directs with enough assurance that these serious flaws will probably seem like minor quibbles to fans of his work. ~ Josh Ralske, Rovi

Cast

• Drea de Matteo - The Wife
• Lillo Brancato Jr. - The Husband
• Ice-T - Kidnapper
• Victor Argo - Louie

Credit

Frank De Curtis - Co-producer, Vebe Borge - First Assistant Director, Abel Ferrara - Director, Bill Pankow - Editor, Suzanne Pillsbury - Editor, Schoolly D - Composer (Music Score), Frank De Curtis - Production Designer, Ken Kelsch - Cinematographer, Pierre Kalfon - Producer, Jeff Pullman - Sound/Sound Designer, Abel Ferrara - Screenwriter, Cassandra DeJesus - Short Story Author

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