The Family

While 2013 has been a pretty good year for movies, it has been pretty rough in the comedy department.  Some of the worst things I saw all year are comedies.  It was with this exceedingly low expectation (and some pretty poor trailers) that I watched The Family.  And it turned out to be a pretty enjoyable movie!

The Family is about a mobster who is in Witness Protection.  He and his family have a very difficult time blending in with other people.  Somehow, they are placed in Normandy.  How can an American mafia family fit in among the inhabitants of a sleepy French village?  They can't.  At all.  And soon enough, the very people they're hiding from come to call.

Almost every joke works.  That's really impressive, if you ask me.  I never laughed out loud, but I chuckled a lot.  And I found myself grinning throughout the entire film.  It's always charming and fun.  The Family is just a piece of casual entertainment.  But that's great!  Sometimes, you just need a movie to provide you with a good time for a couple hours.

The entire cast is great (although Michelle Pfeiffer's accent is pretty bad in the early scenes).  Robert De Niro balances the comedy really well with his mobster persona, which is nice because his comedies are usually dreadful.  Pfeiffer's character is all over the place but never feels false.  And the kids (played by Dianna Agron and John D'Leo) dang near steal the show.  Throw in Tommy Lee Jones doing his grumpy schtick and the main cast is rock solid.

The bulk of the movie revolves around the culture clash between Americans (and sometimes the family's Italian heritage) and the French.  But it's not a movie that praises Americans, nor does it tear them down.  It's very even-handed in that both countries are shown to have their own awesome characteristics as well as some oddball things that the other nation can't stand.  You'll find yourself laughing at American eccentricities as much as you laugh at the French.

The Family's writer/director Luc Besson has made some of my favorite films, but sometimes he engages in a bit of fluff.  Sometimes it works.  Sometimes it doesn't.  This is one of the ones that works.  Now, The Family is no masterpiece.  It'll probably be largely forgotten in a few months, but it's worth a watch.

7 out of 10