Movie review: Household Saints
directed by Nancy Savoca. Screenplay by Nancy Savoca and Richard Guay

Nancy Savoca's latest is a daring film. Throughout, her well-written script hovers on the brink of melodrama. But time and time again she saves her plot from descending into sentimentality. Similarly, her many stereotypical Italian characters totter on the precipice of caricature. But always at the right moment, with a correct phrase or gesture, Savoca snatches them from disaster and brings them back to life as credible people with real-life motivations.

In spite of the long running-time of the film, we are riveted to the screen throughout. She has created a multi-generational film that spans years of her central characters' lives; yet she brings a psychological depth to the development of her characters that goes beyond the realism of her photography.
Based upon Francine Prose's novel, Household Saints focuses on the lives of three generations of women in an Italian American family in New York's Little Italy.

The plot is simple: boy, Joseph Santangelo, played exceptionally well by Vincent D'Onofrio, meets girl, Catherine Falconetti (Tracey Ullman). The young Joseph, who owns a butcher shop, is something of a rogue, at least in the beginning of the story. He flatters all the old neighborhood Italian ladies who come to buy his meat and sausage. Surreptitiously, he weighs his thumb with their orders and gives them a kiss with their overcharged package of meat when they leave. One day the plain and unattractive Catherine, played convincingly and well by Ullman, comes in to buy dinner.

She is more than a match for the Santangelo boy. She catches him weighing his thumb and even manages to pay him less that he asks.

To his mother's great chagrin, He falls in love with the plain, homely Falconetti girl. Carmela (Judith Molina), of course, tells him that he is too good for such a low class girl. But he can't explain it: he wants to marry her.

This is where the real story begins. For the remainder of the film Savoca focuses upon the psychology of her three major female characters: Carmela, Catherine, and Teresa, Catherine and Joseph's soon-to-be daughter. Savoca's three Italian women are brought up in a patriarchal society that limits their roles physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Catherine's marriage to Joseph is all but an arranged marriage. Initially, before Joseph wins her over, Catherine defies her father when he orders her to marry the Santangelo boy.

But this is not a feminist tract on female victimization. Rather it is an understanding treatment of what makes these three Italian women who they are, the struggles they wage, and the ultimate tragedy of their lives in America. It is also about the limits that life in New York's Little Italy placed upon the aspirations and dreams of all of its immigrants and their offspring, men and women. There is a dignity and truth in Savoca's portrayal of her characters that recalls John Turturro's Mac.

Upon Catherine and Joseph's marriage, Joseph's domineering controlling mother, Carmela goes into action. She resents Catherine's intrusion into her and her son's life. It can only mean separation and neglect for her. Carmela's perception of life is controlled by old wives's tales and superstition. She prays daily to her collection of household saints. When poor Catherine becomes pregnant, she frightens her with her wives' tales. In spite of their prayers before the household saints, the baby is still born. Carmela quite appropriately burns the effigy of one of the saints over the gas burner for not answering her prayers for a healthy child.

But what is most important about these scenes is that Catherine, against her will, falls prey to superstitious Carmela. Catherine does not really believe in her mother-in-law's hocus pocus. But though she is a modern woman, she can't quite break loose emotionally from her heritage in that Old World culture, which Carmela represents. She can defy her father; but she cannot free herself entirely from Carmela's control of her emotions and her ambivalent feelings that the multifarious collection of household effigies just might protect her from mal occhio. Interestingly, though, there is a resilience in Catherine's personality. When Carmela suddenly dies, the bond and control is broken. "Is this the miracle you've been praying for?" Joseph asks her. She is liberated. But only long enough to bring another girl, Teresa, the third generation, into her very complex, emotional world.

Teresa, played hauntingly well by Lili Taylor, is caught more than her mother between two worlds: that of her grandmother's Old World superstition and her modern 1960s hedonism. For reasons Teresa cannot explain to herself, she cannot adapt to the free sex and materialism of her 1960s generation. She is educated by the nuns, and decides to become a Carmelite. In a subplot, her high idealism is parallel to her opera loving uncle's yearning to become a bel canto. He is like his niece, Teresa. They are caught between their spirituality and the delimiting circumstances of their Old World culture.

It does not end well for either, the men or the women in Household Saints. But the subtle web that Savoca spins around the lives and minds of her female characters links them over the generations in a common struggle with their spirituality, their past, and, common identity. Teresa never knew her grandmother, Carmela, but her religious yearnings are reminiscent of Carmela's superstitious rituals and beliefs. Her tragedy is that she is ultimately unable to escape the confines of the world that encloses her, as both a contemporary woman and a woman with a long and complex history.

Nancy Savoca must be commended for attempting such an intelligent film, and she must be applauded for its many successes. Her camera work, hard edged, honest, and always intense, contributes as much to the film as the script and the exceptional acting she draws from her characters. With Household Saints Savoca (True Love and Dog Fight) has established herself as a new and important voice in the American cinema.

Kenneth Scambray

 

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