It was day like many other days, and then I popped Household Saints on from the TiVo playlist. Nancy Savoca starts from a novel by Francine Prose but falls into the “throw strange characters into a bowl” fallacy early on, and from there even decent acting jobs by Tracy Ullman, Vincent D’Onofrio and Lilli Taylor can’t really pull it back over the hedge.
We follow Ullman and D’Onofrio through about 20 years of their lives, about 1949-1970ish, from when they came together because he won her (from her Dad) in a game of Pinochle, their early marriage living with his wacky old country Italian Mom and a stillborn baby, through the desperate childhood and strange death of a second, Jesus-obsessed daughter (Taylor). Though the novel probably spends the necessary verbiage establishing these characters and their reasons, the film never has the time and so I never did understand. D’Onofrio “just loves” Ullman, for instance, and can do no better when his mother asks for such help. Minor props to The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli for an amusing portrait of an ambitious young lawyer.
Barely recommended
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