ONCE AROUND
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1991 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Boston Italian family has its problems when their daughter brings home as a lover a flashy, boorish salesman. Salesman overpowers the family and tests the strength of relationships. Comedy-drama has more to it than it may at first seem. Rating: +2 (-4 to +4).
The Bellas are a closely-knit Italian family living near Boston. They have little oddities but they accept each other and as a family they work. Then Renata (played by Holly Hunter) breaks up with her boyfriend and decides she wants to sell condos for a living. She goes to a sales class in St. Martin and brings back a lover. Sam (played by Richard Dreyfus) is an over-ripe salesman with a phenomenal sales record and some odd Lithuanian ways. Sam is welcomed into the family with a big smile that wilts when he is not looking. He simply does not fit it. He upstages family members with extravangances and he overpowers family events with the subtlety of sales pep rallies. As time passes the pressures increase until the family is seriously in danger of splitting up. Is Sam a genuinely destructive force or is the real problem in the family's unwillingness to accept a newcomer who is do different from themselves?
ONCE AROUND is directed by Lasse Hallstrom, the Swede who directed MY LIFE AS A DOG. Like Louis Malle, Hallstrom has insights into American life that an American director might miss. By the same token, however, he misses details such as the inappropriateness of Hunter's accent. She is the main character and she could have really used an accent coach. Dreyfus is, however, well-cast, if not too much differently from his role in TIN MEN and even THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ. The casting of Laura San Giacomo and Gena Rowlands as Renata's sister and mother are both fine. Especially good is Danny Aiello as Renata's father Joe. Much of the friction that makes the story is between the Dreyfus character and the Aiello character. Joe Bella goes through a lot of changes in the course of the film and Aiello is a joy to watch. Also notable is co-producer Griffin Dunne as Renata's boyfriend.
Hallstrom has a good eye for the small dramatic incidents of life and also the daily ironies. While the film is largely about Sam's idiosyncrasies, it takes at least one meaning of its title, ONCE AROUND, from a strange custom of Joe Bella: on important family occasions he traditionally drives around a traffic rotary. But for a little heavy-handed melodrama toward the end, this is a nice comedy-drama worth seeing. I give it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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