“Riff Raff” is a solid crime comedy with unusual wiring. There’s no heist, no bag of money or suitcase of drugs. Instead, the director, Dito Montiel, puts the focus on three clashing families finagling to ensure their loved ones survive a very violent New Year’s Eve.
Ex-hit man Vincent (Ed Harris) has fathered two of of the clans. After screwing up and abandoning his starter family of bawdy Ruth (Jennifer Coolidge) and their loser son Rocco (Lewis Pullman), he about-faced and became a decent man to his prim younger wife, Sandy (Gabrielle Union), and their sheltered teenager D.J. (Miles J. Harvey). The sinners and the saints have stayed more-or-less estranged until Ruth, Rocco and Rocco’s pregnant girlfriend, Marina (Emanuela Postacchini), burst into the vacation cabin fleeing Vincent’s former partner, Leftie (Bill Murray), who’s coming to kill everyone on behalf of his own kid, Jonathan (Michael Angelo Covino). Leftie’s also bringing a sidekick named Lenny, a dialed-down, very funny Pete Davidson.
Blood is priceless. But the family tree that tethers Ruth and Rocco to Sandy and D.J. apparently comes with a noose.
Clearly, this was one hell of a script to convince the reclusive Murray to pick up his phone. The screenwriter John Pollono emerged out of L.A.’s 99-seat theater scene and knows how to braid comedy, tension and thematics. He’s divided his characters along an axis of naïveté. Rocco and D.J. share a dad but otherwise appear to have been raised on separate planets.
This is a movie where someone’s frontal lobes get splatted on a window and drip-drip-plop down in chunks. Yet gradually and convincingly, “Riff Raff” demonstrates not just brains but heart. The first half of the film is almost all getting-to-know-you conversations between these estranged relatives, the best of which involves an extended flashback to how Rocco wooed Marina. We learn that this disheveled gangster has bona fide empathy.
In fact, every character proves capable of sincere emotions. Montiel’s insistence on humanity, even in this kind of gonzo genre flick, develops into his thesis statement. Postacchini in particular makes her girlfriend side character earn a place in the plot. She’s so radiant that when Marina dims her wattage in a vain attempt to stay off the radar, we really feel the light in her go out.
With Leftie and Lonnie en route to the cabin, the score pulses with what sounds like a ticking time bomb, plus something like an eerie musical saw for some extra shivers. Still, the scenes themselves play out floppier than you’d expect. Murray is good, delivering threats in an East Coast rasp and maximizing the dispassion in his eyes. He and Davidson have a wonderfully shaggy dynamic, muttering jokes under their breath. (Davidson even gets a giggle with the line “Nice ziti.”) Leftie and Lonnie’s road-trip subplot mostly takes place hundreds of miles away from the rest of the action with the dubious duo forever promising not to kill innocent people — and then offing them anyway. The best sequence in the whole film is their encounter with two posh suburbanites who simply can’t imagine they’re in danger, bounding right up to them like the Galapagos Islands’ blue-footed boobies.
Part of the problem is another chunk of the cast tries to move through this heightened world like normal people. Union and Harvey seem to be under the impression that they’re audience conduits instead of coddled suckers. Harvey, a rising actor with real potential, has one of the hardest characters. His D.J., a Dartmouth freshman who’s never dealt with anything worse than being friend-zoned by his crush, has to make the kind of hard pivot that doesn’t fit the overall tone. It could work if he was more of a caricature, which might be why Harvey keeps his voice a half-octave too high. I’d have liked to see every bit of him cranked up — from sweaters to smile. The one scene where Montiel uses him like a cartoon, with D.J. butting in over some very serious murder talk while whining about the BBQ grill, is pitch-perfect.
This kind of gory caper teeters on formulaic. We had a million of them in the ’90s. Montiel takes a while to tip his hand that he’s after something more emotionally complex than the first act foretells. There’s genuine pain in the film’s core idea of daddy redos and sibling resentment. Victor was a louse in his first marriage and father of the year in his second. The script seems to believe that his conversion is legitimate, that people can evolve, even though we never believe that he and Union’s Sandy have been happily married for 18 years. As proof, the script inserts a sex scene. It doesn’t work.
The story hinges on us buying into a version of Victor that’s hard to imagine — the cheating louse who had yet to earn the nice home, the debonair cap, the gorgeous younger wife and doting son who don’t know how little about him they actually know. When Rocco, played by Pullman as a sweaty disaster, gets told that he’s just like his pops, we can’t quite see it. Rocco argues that he’s teaching himself to be Victor’s opposite. Poised to be a dad himself, he’s roiling with lava-like anger at his childhood neglect.
We’re so used to rooting for flawed antiheroes, especially ones played with the craggy gravitas of Ed Harris, that it’s almost disorienting when Montiel reveals that he has less respect for Victor than we might have guessed. Like a pool shark, Montiel reveals his intentions only toward the end. The gamble doesn’t pay off as well as it could, but at least “Riff Raff” gets smarter as it goes on.
Coolidge’s early scenes as a drunken potty-mouth play like punishment. Her Ruth is a ghastly creation, a lonely singleton who roams the rooms of her ex’s house like a raccoon, rifling through Sandy’s makeup and pawing at Victor’s crotch like she’s desperate to steal back the life she still wants. Coolidge gets off some great, filthy quips as the camera lingers on her cleavage. But the character is repellent even to her family, who refuses to warm to her even when she tries to win their sympathy with an awkward monologue about how her own father trained her to settle for slop.
Montiel smartly takes Ruth’s noxiousness from comic to pitiful, noting her sad awareness that she’s the odd woman out. Eventually, Leftie will ask the clan which one of them he can kill first. By then, I was almost on her side. Or at least I’d added her back onto the family Christmas card list.
‘Riff Raff’
MPA rating: R (for some strong violence, pervasive language, sexual content/nudity and some drug use)
Running time: 1:43
How to watch: Now in theaters
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