‘Uncle Nino’

Filmmaker Robert Shallcross celebrates smelling the flowers, talking to people, hugging your loved ones, listening to your kids.

By: Bob Brown

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Joe Mantegna (above) plays a dad too caught up in his work to pay attention to the rest of his family until the arrival of a distant relative (Pierrino Mascariño) in ‘Uncle Nino.’


   This movie is so squeaky clean, its PG rating is a bit misleading. It has no nudity, no four-letter words, no weapons and the baddest deed anyone does is drape toilet paper on a neighbor’s lawn. The teen smoker even butts out halfway through this film when Uncle Nino gives him a sorry look. What the film really rates is an S, for super sugary.
   Let’s be fair and praise the independent producers, Kick the Can Productions, for having the courage to release a good-old fashioned family film. It takes some kind of intestinal fortitude to buck the trend. If you saw a trailer for this, or a spot ad, you are one up on me. It has had virtually no advertising and no pre-release hype. Evidently it’s supposed to glide along through word of mouth. This might work in the red states, but the jaded blue states need more of a rush. Why should anyone pay to see this film?
   There are some fine actors in it, foremost among them Joe Mantegna, who plays an Italian-American dad, Robert Micielli. This is a role the actor wears like a glove. After all, the character is virtually a first cousin to Will Girardi, whom Mantegna plays on CBS TV’s hit show Joan of Arcadia. Will is a cop with a tough job and a crusty demeanor, but he’s always fodder for buttering up by his wife and kids. The same goes for Robert, a go-getter who’s on the rise in a tough white-collar job, at the expense of quality family time.
   Teenage son Bobby (Trevor Morgan) and grade-school daughter Gina (Gina Mantegna — yes, folks, she is) crave dad’s attention and understanding. But he’s just too busy getting ahead to appreciate Bobby’s garage band or Gina’s need for a dog. Wife Marie (Anne Archer) can’t even get much of a rise out of the old boy. She falls asleep on the couch in her ineffective red lingerie, waiting for the interminable late night at the office to end. In this movie, "Honey, I have to work late" means exactly that and is not a coverup for something else.
   Writer/director Robert Shallcross based this all-too-familiar family dynamic on his own high-pressure work in an advertising agency. "You could say that I was Robert," he explains about the genesis of the film. He had four kids whom he wasn’t seeing enough because of his work "In general, I see that trend happening in America — of families not really connecting. So I wanted to tell a story about an American family that was missing out on some of the simple, important pleasures in life."
   The Micielli family is meant to be a cross-section of those comfortable, white, middle-class Americans who have moved to the suburbs to get away from the more serious problem of American life, urban decay. If you were a cynical blue-stater, you might say they moved there to avoid having to be bothered by, or responsible for it, while Robert Micielli grabbed for the gold ring. Out in America’s heartland, where this film is apparently getting good box office, this message is not seen as ironic.
   Enter, unexpectedly, Robert’s Italian uncle, Nino (character actor Pierrino Mascariño), who has put off a trip to the U.S. for too long. He comes to stay with the Miciellis for a while to accomplish a personal mission. He has an odd fixation on America as the Land of Lincoln, his hero (in this movie, Oz is Illinois). But Nino is a disruptive force. He doesn’t understand the ways of America, where people send out for Chinese and eat in separate rooms instead of sitting down to a home-cooked meal. Nino is a caricature, a sort of Papa Gepetto in rustic garb, who plays the violin and loves flowers and dogs and people and sunshiny days. He loves Bobby’s garage band and gardening and hugs. What he loves is driving Robert up the wall.
   Naturally, something has got to give. It’s so obvious who has the truth. Life is so uncomplicated when everything is reduced to black and white. The film’s moves are such patented clichés that many viewers will be bored with its bald simplicity. It doesn’t deal with large social issues, just the small domestic ones, and not in a very affecting way for the most part. Predictably, there’s a shameless pull-out-the hanky moment late in the film. It’s regrettable the movie couldn’t bring more to the table, because the filmmaker wants to say something fundamental about the kind of lives we now live in a go-go age.
   The pleasures Robert Shallcross finds lacking happen in places where we can connect: in the kitchen, at the dinner table, in the garden. He celebrates smelling the flowers, talking to people, hugging your loved ones, listening to your kids, staying in touch with family. These things don’t pay the bills. But they pay attention to what matters.
Rated PG. Contains language and some teen smoking.