Mark Reviews Movies: MADE IN ITALY (2020)

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 6, 2020

Made in Italy is a movie about two men talking around everything that really matters. The concept is fine. Writer/director James D'Arcy's feature debut is about a son and a father, who have been estranged for at least five years—and haven't talked about anything substantial for maybe four times that period. A death and the ensuing silence about the subject have ripped this relationship apart, and now, with a time-sensitive career opportunity being presented to the son, the men have to reunite and quite literally deal with and in the past.

This relationship dynamic makes all the sense in the world, and in his casting, D'Arcy has found two of likely only a few pairs of actors who would intrinsically lend this material a sense of verisimilitude. In particular, there's one scene here, when the father and the son finally talk about the one subject they have been avoiding for about two decades, that almost feels as if we have stopped watching performances. When the movie finally arrives at that scene, though, we mainly wonder where this blunt, cutting honesty has been for the rest of the story.

The premise has Jack (Michaél Richardson) about to lose his job. He manages an art gallery owned by his soon-to-be ex-wife's parents. Jack wants to buy it, and the wife gives him a month before the gallery is sold to someone else.

The good news is that Jack partially owns a villa in Tuscany. The bad news is twofold: It has been abandoned since Jack was a child, and the other co-owner is his father Robert (Liam Neeson), a once-successful artist who essentially has gone into solitude. They haven't talked in years, but this opportunity forces Jack to take a trip from London to Italy with his dad. With his share of the house's sale, Jack will purchase the art gallery.

The problems, the opportunities, and the rewards of this situation should be obvious from the start. Obviously, the house is in disrepair, meaning they'll have to work together (and, in theory, spend a lot of money that, somehow, isn't an issue anymore on contractors) to fix up the place. There will be new relationships formed in the process—maybe even potential romantic ones for both single men. The father and the son will trudge through the work and the fact of living under the same roof again, but by the end, they'll discover a lot about each other and forge a re-connection based on this new information, this exorcism of past pain, and this hope that they can be father and son again.

D'Arcy's setup is wholly predictable, but that doesn't matter—or, at least, it shouldn't. What matters, obviously, is that relationship between the two men—how the screenplay, not to mention the actors, depicts the ebbs and flows of this broken bond, how it reveals the various things from the past that tore them apart, how it communicates the emotional truth behind their inevitable reconciliation.

In theory, D'Arcy has a lot of his work completed for him, simply by means of casting. At this point, in case the fact isn't known, it must be told that Neeson and Richardson are father and son in real life. In addition to that, both of them experienced the very public loss of a wife and a mother. Such information almost feels ghoulish to recount, but it also feels necessary. Beneath the shattered relationship between Robert and Jack is the death of the father's wife and the son's mother, whose family owned the villa in Tuscany that the men are preparing to sell.

Here, then, we reach the real potential and the genuine disappointment of this movie. To cast these two actors is to implicitly establish an obvious and specific goal for the movie: Their own experiences will bring a deeper degree of truth to the relationship and the sense of shared loss between the characters. It happens occasionally but only occasionally—and never more so than during the climactic scene, when faced with relics of a past that, despite appearances and attitudes and the lack of discussion about it, has never been forgotten.

Otherwise, D'Arcy himself seems to be avoiding the subject of evaded, long-simmering grief even more than these characters. The story proceeds with plenty of comedy—from the two men fixing up the house (almost being defeated by a stray weasel), to a few pratfalls, to some eccentric prospective buyers—and a subplot in which Jack strikes up a friendship, which unsurprisingly turns into something more, with local restaurant owner Natalia (Valeria Bilello). They bond over divorce and loss, and even Robert opens up to her about the death of his wife and how he reacted. As for Robert's romantic prospects, there's Kate (Lindsay Duncan), the stern real estate agent who eventually reveals a soft spot for a mural of agony that Robert painted on one house of the wall.

None of this is as charming as D'Arcy believes it to be. Worse, though, most of it gives the impression that Made in Italy is distracting us and itself from what it really wants to say.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products