Main Cast: Michael Rispoli, Kelly MacDonald, Kathrine Narducci, Kevin Conway, Matt Servitto
Release Year: 2000
Country: US
Run Time: 107 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Raymond De Felitta directs this warm, colorful tale about a blue collar dreamer who gets more than he bargained for after buying a two-family house. Set during the 1950s in Staten Island, the film charts the financial failures of Buddy (Michael Rispoli), a nice-guy entrepreneur who has perpetual bad luck. While he was in the army, he sang songs on stage to bolster troop morale. During one performance, he received a warm reception from none other than Arthur Godfrey, who invited him to audition when he got back to the U.S. After the war, Buddy's crushingly pragmatic wife Estelle (Katherine Narducci,) along with her very traditional parents, dissuade him from a life in showbiz. After a decade of living with Estelle's parents and failing repeatedly at one get-rich-quick scheme after another, Buddy buys a rundown house with the idea of refurbishing the second floor for living quarters and the first for a pizzeria where he can sing. Estelle grudgingly goes along with it, secretly hoping that this plan will fail so disastrously that he will stop dreaming and lead a "normal" life. Not until he finalizes the purchase does Buddy realize that the house has a pair of squatters: Jim (Kevin Conway), a drunken Irish immigrant, and his much younger, very pregnant girlfriend Mary (Kelly Macdonald). Buddy tries to evict the recalcitrant drunkard, but he refuses to leave. Just as matters are about to come to fisticuffs, Mary goes into labor. To the surprise of everyone, the child is of mixed raced -- the product of a brief tryst that Mary had with an African-American man a while back. Disgusted and disappointed, Jim shuffles off never to be seen. Buddy hasn't quite the heart to evict a young single mother, nor the strength to resist his wife's perpetual nagging, so he quietly pays for a room in a neighborhood boarding house. Though Mary is initially very mistrustful of Buddy's intentions, the two slowly realize that they are in fact soul mates. This film was highly praised at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Review
A movie of disarming sweetness, Raymond De Felitta's Two Family House is as accomplished as it is unassuming. A period piece set in 1950s Staten Island, the movie tells the story of Buddy (Michael Rispoli), a working-class family man whose kindness -- he secretly subsidizes an adulterous Irish woman (Kelly McDonald) who has just given birth to a dark-skinned baby -- leads to pariah status in his insular Italian-American neighborhood. Casually humanistic, the movie's depiction of an ethnic community has the warm finish of fondly remembered lore. For all its seemingly fuzzy nostalgia, Two Family House serves as a corrective to idealized representations of the 1950s as a simpler (and hence, better) time. Underlying the movie's action is the neighborhood's blithe racism, which when it erupts casually in everyday banter is genuinely jarring. Made with evident affection, Two Family House makes a couple of lapses into preciousness -- a sequence depicting the narrator's first memories as an infant comes to mind -- and sometimes verges on caricature. Considering the number of opportunities the story presents for such missteps, however, the movie is impressively free of bathos and cynicism. With its generosity and unforced moralizing, Two Family House seems oddly anachronistic: a modest, humane movie about nothing less than the values we choose to live by. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide
Louis Guss - Donato; Rosemary de Angelis - Marie; Victor Arnold - Mr. Cicco; Richard B. Shull - Mr. Brancaccio; Anthony Arkin - Danny; Michele Santopietro - Laura
Credit
Georgianne Walken - Casting, Sheila Jaffe - Casting, Julia Kim - Casting, Liz McGarrity - Costume Designer, Raymond de Felitta - Director, David Leonard - Editor, Adam Brightman - Executive Producer, Stephen Endelman - Composer (Music Score), Susan Jacobs - Musical Direction/Supervision, Teresa Mastropiero - Production Designer, Michael Mayers - Cinematographer, Antonio Arroyo - Sound/Sound Designer, Raymond de Felitta - Screenwriter
An unseen narrator looks back to the year 1956, on Staten Island in New York, to one Buddy Visalo (Rispoli), an Italian guy with "Ralph Kramdenesque" dreams. Buddy is a wannabe crooner (with a voiceover provided by Andrew Poretz). Buddy had nearly been discovered by Arthur Godfrey ten years earlier (shown in flashback) when he performed at a USO show while in the service. His fiancée, Estelle (Narducci), gave him a Hobson's choice: “Who's it gonna be, Buddy, Arthur Godfrey or me?” In a decision he’ll live to regret the rest of his life, he chooses Estelle, and over the next 10 years tries all sorts of schemes to get ahead. “I just wanna be somebody!” he’ll declare.
Italian-American Buddy decides to buy a dilapidated two-family house in the Irish section of town, intending to live upstairs with his wife Estelle and run a bar downstairs, where he could live out a smaller version of his dream, singing along to a "Music Minus One" jukebox (a precursor to karaoke). Estelle has no confidence in Buddy, just wants a “normal” blue-collar husband, and manages to undermine his plans time and time again. He discovers, to his dismay and her horror, that the upstairs Irish tenants, a drunken, violent older man (played by Kevin Conway) and his very pregnant young wife (played by Kelly Macdonald of Trainspotting fame) refuse to move and won't pay rent.
When the baby is born, it's clear his father was black – and the much older, Irish husband immediately skulks off, knowing it's not his child. Buddy evicts mother and child, then feels guilt and sets her up in a flat while she sorts out an adoption. Estelle's lack of faith, the small-minded prejudices and low ambitions of his “friends,” the Irish lass's spirit, Buddy's dream, racial prejudice, and the baby's fate (he grows up to be the narrator of the movie) play out.
Trivia
The song "Lonely For You", sung in the movie by Buddy as well as jazz singer John Pizzarelli (who also has a cameo as Arthur Godfrey), was written by the director's father, film director Frank De Filitta, over 40 years earlier, but had never been otherwise recorded.
