MOVIE DETAILS
Rating: 6.3 out of 10
Director: Raymond De Felitta
Writer: Jonathan Fernandez
Star: Michael Pitt, Nina Arianda, Andy Garcia
Genres: Biography/Crime/Drama
Release Date: April 17, 2014 (Ukraine)
In 1991, when John Gotti was being tried and New York City was getting all its news from the front page of the Daily News, a story briefly took over the front pages a sideshow to the main event: A couple in crazy love from Queens, taking advantage of the chaos in the mob world, started robbing various Mafia social clubs and pocketing the cash. They knew no one in The Life would ever call the cops. And anyway, wasn’t it more like stealing from obviously bad guys? So “Rob the Mob,” directed by Raymond De Felitta and written by Jonathan Fernandez, looks at that sideshow from multiple angles. It’s breezy and sleazy but sometimes-intense; it’s a very specific sliver of New York history an era entirely overrun with crack and graffiti and gangsters.
Tommy (Michael Pitt) and Rosie Uva (Nina Arianda) have just gotten out of prison for holding up a florist’s shop. They’re so in love! She got a job working at some debt collection agency run by a smiling enthusiast played by Griffin Dunne who likes to hire ex-cons because he himself did two years for fraud. Rosie is one of those people with an ingratiating supportive attitude plus intellectual shortcomings but she also has this big laugh that suggests she will survive anything which is good because her boss decides to give Tommy work too after Rosie talks him into it. When they fall short one month they go on their reckless quick-cash crime spree: Rosie drives, Tommy does stick-ups wearing ski masks; he accidentally fires off an Uzi into club ceilings and back walls while wise guys empty their wallets issuing threats about what’ll happen once they find him. When Tommy comes home to their bleak cold-water flat after one such night he tells her how easy it was then she laughs and says she knows: “I’m driving around waiting for you in a stolen car.”
The film does not only follow Tommy and Rosie. From Frank Whaley’s perspective, the FBI agent who relentlessly tries to find out more information about the structure and ranking of New York crime families, it looks at their whole criminal career. We also get to know Jerry Cardozo (Ray Romano is really excellent), an older reporter who has been following the Mafia for thirty years; he writes a front page story on the two criminals and calls them “Bonnie and Clyde,” but one day Rosie phones him at his desk to correct a fact in his article. There are also some scenes showing how nervous the mob gets from the Gotti trial combined with all these sudden heists. Here the Mafia is run by a reclusive boss named “Big Al” with a shady past (Andy Garcia plays him he wears a white Ernest Hemingway beard and gives this tightly wound performance).
They steal Joey D.’s wallet during one of their hold-ups (Burt Young). Inside there’s a folded piece of loose leaf paper and on it is written what will be called “The List”: a family tree of the Mob, its internal structure, its command set-up. It gives home phone numbers. Down at police headquarters while Gotti’s on trial downtown they’re pulling double shifts trying to figure out who reported to whom in the organization; as usual, there is no H.R. department. “The List” would be that break for them but if they’re frightened enough all their knowledge could still turn into power so Tommy and Rosie keep using it like that: as leverage against these people whose names they don’t even know.
Rob the Mob” glamorizes Tommy and Rosie, displaying them in slow motion dancing through raining money, and kissing in the rain on an empty Coney Island boardwalk, but they are not as iconic as other famous crime spree couples captured on film. The sentimentality of some scenes and the romantic soundtrack is all balanced out by casting Pitt and Arianda, who easily inhabit their parts grubbily. Both actors depict characters who are clearly very stupid, hopelessly so even, but do it without being condescending about it. You don’t feel like they’re slumming. Tommy and Rosie lack any self-awareness or powers of self-reflection. It’s a particularly interesting turn for Tony award winner Arianda who was fascinating to watch with her small part in “Midnight in Paris” where she droningly happily repeated whatever her snobby husband said; here Rosie is filled with enthusiasm for those around her (watch how she butters up her boss cheering him on like at pep rally) despite initially resisting Tommy’s plan, finally embracing it wholeheartedly: She’s not killing anyone. She’s stealing from bad men. “What’s the crime in that?” she says to Cardoza, grinning at him over pizza that she just offered him some of Arianda shows Rosie’s shallow understanding of complex ideas by freezing her face into a smile with confused eyes when confronted by something beyond her comprehension. To which Cardoza begins “We got a saying in the newspaper world” but before he can finish she chirps brightly cutting him off misses entire point: “I love sayings! Slogans!”
The rest of the cast is filled out by sturdy New York character actors you’ve seen forever grounding the film firmly in its place and time. Cathy Moriarty has a heartbreaking cameo as Tommy’s mother devastated after years of disappointment violence; Moriarty also gives an unforgettable cameo performance upcoming “The Double”. It’s exciting to think about where she’s going with her career.
“Rob the Mob” is too cutesy a title for this dark grubby little tale.
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