‘About My Father’ movie review: Robert De Niro and the audience deserve more

Sebastian Maniscalco and Robert De Niro in a scene from ‘About My Father’
| Photo Credit: Dan Anderson

In Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, stand-up comedian Sebastian Maniscalco played Joey Gallo, a real-life gangster who gets killed by Frank Sheeran, played by the legendary Robert De Niro. Now, the actors are back together, as son and father, in the comedy film About My Father that’s light years away from what they did with the auteur and despite the right intentions, it feels like the comedian has avenged the death of his character.

In About My Father, Sebastian Maniscalco plays a fictionalised version of himself, a man who grew up wanting to chase the American dream, while also trying to move away from the gargantuan shadow cast by his father Salvo Maniscalco (De Niro), a traditional Italian immigrant who cuts hair for a living but doesn’t mince his words. The duo has to visit the super-rich family of Sebastian’s girlfriend Ellie (Leslie Bibb) and while Sebastian is planning on proposing to her during the Fourth of July holidays, Salvo wants to personally check things out before handing over their family ring to his son. It’s the classic case of the father being slightly obnoxious, heavily opinionated and too charismatic for his own good while the son is just embarrassed by his father’s antics and the unlikely pair have to stick together for the greater good.

The film relies on culture shock for humour for most of its modest run-time. While the Maniscalcos are simple yet fun and loving folks, the Collins are an eclectic bunch of aristocrats. Ellie is the most approachable person in the Collins family that’s headed by the matriarch Tigger (Kim Cattrall), a politician who thrives on news channel debates while Ellie’s father Bill (David Rasche), a staunch baron, always acts happy. There are also Ellie’s brothers – the annoying, drug-addicted Lucky (Anders Holm) and the hippy Doug (Brett Dier) who is up for a healing session any time. When these two distinct worlds collide, they do make for some hilarious sequences, but the rest of it is pretty much what we expect it to be.

Robert De Niro in a scene from About My Father
| Photo Credit:
Dan Anderson

About My Father is a medley of several family comedies we’ve enjoyed over the years – My Big Fat Greek Wedding and even De Niro-starrer Meet the Parents. It gets the romance portions right, thanks to the charming Leslie Bibb and stand-up comedian Sebastian Maniscalco’s decent acting in his first outing as the lead. The moving, emotional conversations between the two Maniscalcos that end with a few sprays of night cologne are heart-touching too. But for a comedy film, About My Father lacks heavily on the humour quotient.

Yes, there are a few funny stretches, like the one where Sebastian loses his shorts during flyboarding and Salvo’s tryst with the peacocks. The film also has some hilarious dialogues that feel like lines from Sebastian’s stand-up shows. In a scene, he complains about his ancestors having curved spines and a resting b**** face. In another, to denote how rich his girlfriend’s family is, he mentions how the Roman numerals on their names are something he associates only with the popes and the Rocky films. Unfortunately, these sequences aren’t as many as one would expect from a genre-specific film. Many of the jokes fall flat as they seem to be mere visual representations of gags one would expect from a stand-up show.

De Niro, as always, steals the show. He aces the role of an immigrant for whom every dollar matters and probably the only thing more important is his family. The scenes where he uses poisoned spam to kill the rats and squirrels messing up his home garden and the one where he buries evidence like it’s a dead body are funny homages to the mob films that stand tall in his stellar body of work. But About My Father rarely offers him much to work on and the few brilliant stretches where he shines end up making the rest look even more insipid. The film is not even close to how funny it tries to be but almost makes up for it by having the right intentions. But since that also hovers over largely familiar territory, About My Father feels more like sketches belonging to a TV show rather than a full-fledged comedy film.

About My Father is currently running in theatres