In movies about people in the federal witness protection program (I keep thinking of My Blue Heaven and Sister Act, though I’m sure there are better examples), it’s practically inevitable that the main character gets found out by the very bad guys he’s trying to hide from. And so it goes in The Family, Luc Besson’s not-bad new comedy about a former mafioso (Robert De Niro) relocated to Normandy, France, along with his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) and teenage kids (Dianna Agron, John D’Leo). Thankfully, Besson makes the best of a screenwriting cliche; the way De Niro’s enemies learn of his whereabouts comprises one of the film’s cleverest sequences. It begins in Normandy, where De Niro’s son is asked to submit an English-language pun to the high school newspaper. He recalls, in flashback, a joke that one of his father’s mob buddies told another: the goon had decided to see a production of Boris Godunov because “if it’s ‘Godunov’” for a friend, “it’s good enough for me.” The paper goes to press and, a few shots later, a classmate brings it home. It then makes its way into the briefcase of the boy’s father, who leaves the next day on a business trip to New York. When the father arrives, he throws away the paper, which goes to a junkyard and then to the home of one of the men who work there. An associate of his uses the paper to wrap up a bottle of wine, which he delivers to the prison cell of a gangster who’d been identified in court by De Niro.
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As the movie unfolds, it becomes clear that De Niro isn’t spoofing just his roles in earlier crime movies but American stereotypes in general. His character, his wife, and their daughter are all violent hotheads—whenever they encounter conflict, their first instinct is to pummel, kill, or wreak extensive property damage. For this reason, they have trouble staying undercover for very long, forcing the Witness Protection Program to give them new identities every several months. (Jones, playing the federal agent overseeing their case, seems to be spoofing his beleaguered lawman from No Country for Old Men.) Their son, on the other hand, channels his energy into ambitious racketeering operations. In another comic set piece, he sizes up the black markets in his new high school (cigarettes, answers to math tests, etc) in the fashion of De Niro’s narration from Casino.
Directed and cowritten by Luc Besson
