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Brooklyn Lobster

2005, Movie, NR, 90 mins

Brooklyn Lobster: Review

BROOKLYN LOBSTER
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Presented by Martin Scorsese, this small-scale drama about working-class New Yorkers trying to hold onto their piece of the city's past speaks to the same nostalgia Scorsese no doubt feels for the Little Italy of his youth, which has since been swallowed up by Chinatown at one end and tourist traps at the other. But on its own terms, writer-director Kevin Jordan's second feature — he debuted with the eccentrically titled drama SMILING FISH & GOAT ON FIRE (2000), about two diametrically different brothers — is slight, rambling stuff buoyed by fine performances. Christmas is approaching, and pigheaded patriarch Frank Giorgio Danny Aiello) has lost his house and is on the verge of losing the family business, Giorgio's Lobster Farm, at public auction because his bank defaulted on the business-expansion loan he took out to finance an adjoining seafood restaurant. His hopes of salvaging Giorgio's are pinned on a half-baked scam that would allow his son-in-law, Justin (Ian Kahn), to buy up the business without having to bid competitively. Frank's marriage to the long-suffering Maureen (Jane Curtin, the film's calm center) is drifting apart, and she's moved in with their daughter, Lauren (Marisa Ryan), rather than live with Frank in the office suite upstairs from their picturesquely run-down seafood warehouse. Lauren, in turn, has her own full plate: She works as her father's bookkeeper and she and Justin have a new baby. Lauren's brother, Michael (Daniel Sauli) is working up the nerve to propose to his girlfriend, Kerry (Heather Burns), and is doing his best not to get sucked back into the ongoing Girogio-family drama. The last straw may be a broken water pipe that threatens all the lobsters currently in stock: Nothing short of a holiday miracle can salvage the situation. Jordan knows this milieu well; his grandfather was once known as "the lobster king of New York" and his family nearly lost the venerable restaurant/seafood wholesale business Jordan's Lobster Dock when a bank defaulted on their loan. The short documentary feature Jordan and his brothers once made to raise money for Jordan's was this film's immediate inspiration. But however fact-based the material may be, Jordan's salt-of-the-earth characters, with their bluster and pride and rough-edged loyalty, are all too familiar, and their travails feel formulaic, right down to the life-affirming climax. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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