About My Father

About My Father

When did Robert De Niro ever do a straight comedy? I’m going to say “Midnight Run,” but he wasn’t exactly funny in it. He was great at slapstick and comic banter, and he introduced that signature expression the stone faced look of disapproval that made him a bankable star, finally, instead of just a great actor.

It wants to communicate “I am withholding judgment on this thing that is happening in front of me” but actually says “I want out of here,” or “I want to die,” or “I wish I could kill you.” The tight-lipped proto scowl, the burning stare, the squared shoulders. It’s funny. It’s always funny. You can add it to anything, even in copious quantities, and make it better. It’s comedy pepper.

Comedian Sebastian Maniscalco loves it so much that he built a movie around it. Directed by Laura Terruso, “About My Father” wants to be another “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” and there are so few movies like that in theaters that it might become a success despite reviews like this one.

Narrated up one side and down the other (by Maniscalco), and willing you to believe for some reason that an Italian-American marrying into a WASP family would represent a culturally fraught scenario with high failure potential in 2023, the movie runs from mediocre to painless with occasional moments of charm. But there’s no denying that it pushes some of the same buttons as those pushed by the “Fockers” films, where De Niro played another emotionally constipated patriarch; those were gigantic box office hits (of course they were).

From the “I can’t believe that person just said that” reaction shots to all those obligatory moments of over the top slapstick involving men getting hit in their privates or falling off roofs while urinating onto power lines, “About My Father” ticks all the boxes. It falls somewhere between the “Greek Wedding” movies and De Niro’s “Dirty Grandpa,” though it never does anything genuinely provocative or disturbing.

Maniscalco plays an attractive middle-aged man named Sebastian who runs a hotel and has commitment issues; his father, Salvo (De Niro), is a widowed hairdresser who holds his late wife’s wedding ring in reserve until he can check out whatever family his boy decides to marry into. That moment arrives when he falls in love with Ellie (Leslie Bibb), who, like Sebastian, works in hotels and has sort of a modified Manic Pixie Dream Girl personality (she paints abstracts that look like a part of the female anatomy).

Ellie’s family are immigrants, too but they came over on the Mayflower, so that was a long time ago and her mother Tigger (Kim Cattrall), a senator, and father Bill (David Rasche), a moneybags country-club owner, invite Sebastian to attend their annual Independence Day blowout in their exclusive town. When Sebastian asks dad for the ring, pop pressures him into letting him tag along because he needs to vet the new in-laws and because there wouldn’t be a movie if he didn’t.

You may find it hard to accept that a man who was supposedly a famous hairdresser in the 1980s would be frightened by entering a rich person’s house, let alone eating at a country club where the richest person automatically pays and it’s cashless. Salvo also comes across as uptight and reactionary, even though you’d think someone like him might have done lines off the men’s room sinks at Maxwell’s Plum during the Reagan administration while Frankie Goes to Hollywood blasted through the speakers or whatever.

(Maniscalco based Salvo on his own father, so we’ll defer to his judgment.) There is much of this sort of thing: earthy working class guys expressing dismay at the lifestyles of the rich and famous and commiserating about how weird Ellie’s younger brother Doug (Brett Dier), with his New Age stoner vibe and obsession with learning to play sound bowls, or her older brother Lucky (Anders Collins), a strapping, smiling frat boy doofus who radiates the natural authority of a rich man’s son who knows he’ll inherit millions someday but whom a squirrel could beat at checkers.

“About My Father” would have worked better as a period piece. It feels like it takes place in another time even though everybody is wearing modern clothes and making modern references. (You know Ellie’s folks are preppies because they wear boat shoes and tie sweaters around their necks.) Movies from the ’30s through the ’50s were filled with class-anxiety moments and were better than recent entertainments like this one at conveying their nuances even when they were slapstick driven. The characters had snappier clothes, too.

All that being said, there is no denying that this ensemble plays off each other expertly. There are several can’t-miss comedy bits that use ancient formulas, such as the scene where somebody says essentially “There is no way in hell I will ever do a thing like that,” and the movie immediately cuts to them doing it, or the extended setpiece where Sebastian loses his swim trunks while futzing with a flyboard rider near the would be in laws’ yacht.

The script is smart about planting bits of character information and paying them off later (such as Sebastian’s fear of flying in helicopters, and his nightly ritual with his dad that involves spritzing cologne into the air and walking through the mist). The star is fine, sometimes better than fine, holds his own opposite De Niro, but if I were Ben Stiller or Kevin Hart, I wouldn’t be losing sleep.

De Niro is the engine that keeps this refurbished jalopy putt-putting along for 90 minutes. There are a couple scenes that suggest the stronger, more fascinating movie this might’ve been: Salvo talking to his late wife while sitting on a bench by himself at night only to be interrupted by Doug and a scene between Salvo and Tigger where De Niro and Sex and the City alum Kim Cattrall display natural flirty chemistry (even blowing cigar smoke rings at each other). You may find yourself fantasizing about what the film could have become if they’d decided to go down that road.

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