Federal Hill

Federal Hill is the Little Italy of Providence, Rhode Island, a city dominated by the contrast between its working-class neighborhoods and the ivory tower citadel of Brown University. We first meet local boy Ralph (Nicholas Turturro) as he's burgling a house, mixing business with pleasure: why just steal the jewelry when you can also have a quick wank over the slinky lingerie that spills out of the bedroom drawers? He later joins his best buddy Nicky (Anthony De Sando) at the local all-night hot dog stand for a little macho banter and general fooling around. They hook up with some pals, and amuse themselves by playing chicken with a jeep full of college boys, smashing in their windshield with a tire iron just to show them who really rules the road. FEDERAL HILL takes place in world in which guys will be guys--which is to say, card-playing, beer-swilling, rabble-rousing jerks--regardless of their responsibilities to wives, jobs, or children. When Nicky and Ralph and the boys get together, you know there's going to be girl-slapping, gay-bashing, or car-crashing before the night's over.

Nicky, a sometime mechanic whose dad owns a used car lot, isn't a bad kid; he has a little style and he'd like to make something of his life, though he's not sure exactly what. Ralph is tougher and less romantic. He's a thief and a troublemaker, and he's not too bright; he's the kind of conniver who can think up a clever scam like making copies of customers' house keys when they leave them with the parking attendant at a local restaurant, but not bright enough to realize he shouldn't use keys belonging to the local mob boss (Frank Vincent) to rob his house, because there's bound to be trouble. Nicky and Ralph have been buddies since they were kids, but they're beginning to drift apart, and the process is accelerated when Nicky takes up with Wendy (Libby Langdon), a Brown co-ed whom he meets when she buys some cocaine from him for a college party. He and Ralph get themselves invited to the frat boy bash, where it's all too apparent that they're out of their social depth. Still, Nicky asks Wendy on a date, wows her with his home cooking, and soon the two are making vague plans for a happy future that Ralph correctly surmises will not include him.

Things come to a head when Wendy's parents pay a visit to town and Nicky persuades her to let him take them all to dinner. While he's doing his best to charm them over scungilli, Ralph breaks into their hotel room and trashes the place. After the inevitable blow-up, which leaves everybody mad at everybody else, Ralph stalks Wendy at school, but mistakenly kills Nicky, who's gone to try to patch things up between them. Ralph then murders the mob boss, and carefully bricks up the gun at a half-finished construction site.

FEDERAL HILL isn't a bad movie. It just feels too much like the product of a bet--"Bet you couldn't make a movie like MEAN STREETS, Mr. Scorsese Wannabe." In fact, there are lots of admirable things about FEDERAL HILL, starting with Richard Crudo's sparkling black-and-white cinematography, which makes the whole film look like an especially good episode of the TV crime series "Naked City." It's easy to describe the main characters in terms of their MEAN STREETS counterparts, with De Sando playing the updated version of Harvey Keitel's Charlie, while Turturro reprises Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy, but Corrente does his best to give them their quirks and flaws, some of which are genuinely effective. Ralph's tender relationship with his elderly father, who's suffering from a degenerative condition, is genuinely moving, and Nicky's dreams of self-improvement have a childish edge that would be funny if it weren't so desperate. When he tells Wendy's parents he was hoping he could accompany Wendy on a school archeological expedition, making himself useful by driving and cooking and fixing things, it's hard to know whether to laugh or cry at his total incomprehension.

The film's weakest elements all have to do with the world beyond Federal Hill. In particular, Wendy bears no resemblance to any real student who ever lived; a vanilla goddess floating through a charmed life in which coveted internships are tossed around like monopoly money, she's as much a mystery to Corrente as she is to Nicky. Like last year's AMONGST FRIENDS and LAWS OF GRAVITY, FEDERAL HILL proves that the ethnic coming-of-age picture is still viable, but it also demonstrates that unless the filmmaker's grasp of the details is strong enough to compensate for the familiar broad strokes, the genre is a bit worn around the edges. (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, substance abuse, profanity.) leave a comment