FEDERAL HILL
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1994 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: A circle of five friends is destroyed by
the selfishness of one of their number.
Author/producer/director Michael Corrente takes
stories from his youth and creates a loose drama
reminiscent of MEAN STREETS. The plot is familiar,
but Corrente's direction keeps the film fresh.
Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4)
Michael Corrente is a young filmmaker who has financed, written, and directed his own film. Both the director's story and the film's story have a ring of familiarity. Corrente's history is a parallel of Barry Levison's. Each chose as a first film to tell the story of his small ring of friends, but somewhat fictionalized. Each made a good film on a very low budget. And though Levison had a much better feel for memorable characters in his DINER than Corrente does with FEDERAL HILL, each made an impressive first film. One thing we can conclude is that Levison grew up in a better neighborhood. Much of what Corrente tells of his friends has a sting reminiscent of GOODFELLAS and MEAN STREETS.
Ralph, Nicky, Frank, Joey, and Bobby (played respectively by Nicholas Turturro, Anthony DeSando, Michael Raynor, Robert Tutano, and Jason Andrews) are friends who grew up together in Federal Hill, the heavily Italian-American section of Providence, Rhode Island. Each of the friends is connected with crime in one way or another. Ralph robs houses; Nicky deals cocaine; Bobby is a loser who deals in counterfeit money and owes the big boys $30,000. Joey is nearly straight. He did time after doing a job with buddies who left him holding the bag. Now he has a wife and his worst crime is violating parole by gambling with his buddies. Frank is the only one of the guys who is straight and who tries to keep the others out of trouble. He can afford to be straight- --his father is a local boss in the syndicate. When Nicky meets a cute, rich Brown student (Libby Langdon, wife of Michael Corrente) he has visions of marrying her. But getting in the way is Ralph, a loose cannon who is getting into bigger crime. He wants to pull his housemate and best friend Nicky in with him, but he is willing to settle for dragging in Bobby.
The plot of FEDERAL HILL works just a little too predictably and melodramatically. Following the well-worn conventions of films like THE GODFATHER, the plot gets more and more taut as the story proceeds until it seems inevitable that there will be violence. The formula is followed down even to the cooking scene where we learn how to make some terrific Italian dish (in this case a tempting Aglio e Olio with Parmesan cheese).
Whether this film will be a star-maker the way DINER was is still in question. Certainly none of the actors in the film has the same sort of screen presence of the characters of DINER. Nicholas Turturro, who gives the film what modest acting flash it has, has gone on to television work. Libby Langdon is attractive as Wendy, but she simply fails to do much with her character beyond what was on the printed page of the script. Probably what sets this film apart from others in its class is the mood effect created by black-and-white photography.
As a first film this low-budget, semi-autobiographical crime film is polished and has some interesting moves that make the familiar aspects seem a little fresher. The true test for Corrente will be the second film. This one gets a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Perhaps the second film should be THE MAKING OF FEDERAL HILL. Corrente has a number of interesting stories to tell about how the film was made. One of the better ones involves his refusal to use a union crew in order to save money. Apparently the local union wanted to hire an enforcer to break Corrente's legs to teach him a lesson. "I can't do that," the enforcer said, "Michael Corrente is my little brother." "Oh. Okay," the union rep said. "Gee, what a small, funny world this is!"
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews