The Fresh View of ‘Fresh Kills’
Plus: a Sutherland, assigned!
Fresh Kills, the directorial debut of actress Jennifer Esposito showing in a limited number of theaters and on VOD now, is positioned as a sort of counterpart to mob movies where the children of mobsters and their inner lives are kept to the side. No one would accuse Goodfellas of ignoring the women in Henry Hill’s (Ray Liotta) life, precisely—Lorraine Bracco earned an Oscar nomination for her work as Karen Hill—but the impact of Henry’s work on the souls of his children is merely glimpsed. Kids being hauled to prison so mom can smuggle in meats and pills; a cut to a little girl staring wide-eyed in a doorframe while mom and dad scream at each other. The lives of children in Casino are reduced to a little girl sticking her tongue out at James Woods in the background and getting tied to a bed when mommy goes out for dinner and drinks.1
The Sopranos is the most intense examination of the lives of mob kids, as one might expect from a show that ran for nearly a decade and watched the brother-and-sister team of Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and A.J. (Robert Iler) grow from children into semi-functioning, semi-compromised adults. But even here, they were largely shielded from the vicissitudes of mob life by their parents; their drama is more domestic in nature.
Though Fresh Kills is undoubtedly a movie about mob life—Domenick Lombardozzi plays Joe Larusso, the head of a Staten Island crime family, though he is largely an offscreen presence; we mostly follow his wife, Francine (Esposito), and daughters, Connie (Odessa A’Zion) and Rose (Emily Bader), as they try to navigate mafia life—it reminded me less of a pure Mob Movie and more of the emotional terrorism of the Safdie Brothers’s Uncut Gems and Good Times, or Nick Cassavetes’s Alpha Dog, or Larry Clark’s Bully. Like these movies, Fresh Kills rachets up the tension remorselessly, offering the children at its center fewer and fewer avenues of escape, until they find themselves cornered and confused.
“Emotional terrorism” is intended as a compliment; there’s something deeply affecting about watching Rose (played first as a child by Anastasia Veronica Lee and then as a teen/young adult by Bader) wrestle with her life as a mob princess. It’s unclear at first the extent to which she understands the criminality of her father and his cronies, but the young girl’s willful silence comes to feel more like a vow than a psychological crutch: she refuses to speak because she wants to speak no evil, to condone nothing she experiences, even accidentally.
Connie is more accepting of her father’s chosen profession, understanding that her family and The Family are more or less synonymous by the time they are young adults trying to make their way through the world. While Rose harbors delusions that she might make it as a guest host for Sally Jesse Raphael or as a hairdresser, Connie understands the score. Hell, she revels in it. She’ll toss a girl a beating if she gets out of line. She’ll take over a bakery her father’s put in her name, knowing full well it’s a front for something nefarious. A’Zion plays the role with a flouncy aggressiveness, and there’s a streak of scornful vindictiveness that defines her relationship to Rose. Connie resents Rose for not getting with the program, for dreaming of a life beyond the mob. Dream small, live big: that’s the real mafia code.
A'Zion’s performance feels stronger, but that may simply be because her Connie is closer to the traditional wise guy, imbued with the mob soldier’s typical amorality and comfort with a criminal lifestyle. It’s the shock and horror on Bader’s face when Rose sees her father arrested on murder charges that is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Her sense of hopelessness in that moment is absolutely harrowing, just a gut-punch sequence of events that culminates in a humiliating loss of bodily control.
Again, the moment called to mind Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), tissues stuffed in his bloody nostrils, hunched over his desk and howling in fearful frustration at his lowest moment in Uncut Gems. Esposito expertly strips Rose of her agency in Fresh Kills, reducing her options and narrowing the potential paths of her life. While the film blinks a bit at the end, it’s traumatic for character and audience alike, and hits home with scarring emotional intensity.
Links!
On Across the Movie Aisle this week we discussed Inside Out 2 and The Bikeriders. Two movie week! The multiplex is back, baby!
I’m still absorbing this piece by Matthew Ball on the state of theatrical attendance, but the chart that feels most important to me is the one labeled “Movie Theater Admissions Per Capita,” which shows attendance falling from the introduction of broadcast TV to 1970 or so, where it stabilizes at just under 5 movies per person per year.
IATSE (the union representing the Hollywood trades organizations) and the AMPTP reached a deal, avoiding another potential strike. That’s good news!
I had a great time talking to John DeVore last week about his new book, Theatre Kids, as well as living through a revolution in the world of media in the post-9/11, pre-iPhone age. Things have changed, and not entirely for the better!
The new “conservative comedy” cartoon on Twitter is skin-crawlingly awful.
The box office numbers Inside Out 2 is putting up are absolutely staggering, which is kind of surprising since I was assured no family would ever take their kids to a Disney movie anymore.
“New Harry Potter series from the creators of Succession” sounds like a joke, but it is, apparently, very real. Curious to see how this turns out.
Assigned Viewing: Don’t Look Now (Criterion Channel)
I wrote a bit about Donald Sutherland last week, highlighting my favorite of his supporting performances. But he was a great leading man as well; my favorite of his leading roles is like the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Don’t Look Now, in which he plays a grieving father who heads to Venice with his wife following the death of their daughter. While in the crumbling canal city, he starts seeing glimpses of what he believes to be the dead girl as his wife, played by Julie Christie, falls under the sway of supposed psychics. I won’t say much more than that, except to pay attention to the editing in this odd psycho-horror thriller; Roeg was doing interesting things with montage in the 1970s, most notably in his David Bowie-starring sci-fi flick The Man Who Fell to Earth.
I don’t mean to pick on Scorsese here, these are just the first two examples that popped into my mind. For what it’s worth, he has made an excellent movie about a child pushed into an impossible situation: Kundun.
Man, that review of Fresh Kills felt like reading Pauline Kael way back when. 🙏