There is a sincere risk that every actor takes when being cast in a television show or movie franchise. After playing the same role for five to ten years, audiences see that character in every portrayal for the rest of the actor’s career. Take, for example, James Gandolfini and Kristen Stewart. After six seasons of playing the rough, brutish mobster in The Sopranos, it’s hard to see Gandolfini as anyone other than Tony; and following two Twilight films, Stewart has created an image of herself as a clean, abstinent lover of sparkly vampires. In Jake Scott’s Welcome To The Rileys, both actors try and shed that image by, respectively, playing a caring father pining after his dead daughter and a 16-year old stripper/prostitute. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work for either of them.
In the film, Gandolfini plays Doug Riley, the owner of a plumbing supply company in Indianapolis. Eight years prior, the Riley’s lost their daughter, causing his wife, Lois (Melissa Leo), to lock herself inside their home. Called away to New Orleans for a convention, Doug wanders into a strip club where he meets the young Mallory (Stewart). After spending time with her, but refusing to have sex, Doug makes a decision: he doesn’t want to go home. Taking up residence in Mallory’s rundown apartment and paying her $100 a day to do so, Doug tries to help the girl in any way he can, using whatever resources he has towards supporting her.
While having the two principals playing against type doesn’t do the film any favors, it’s the trope filled script that weighs down the whole production. From the moment the two meet and he refuses her aggressive come-ons, it’s obvious where the set-up is going, Doug seeing the young, troubled girl as a surrogate for the daughter he has lost. By introducing this dynamic so quickly, the relationship between the two becomes stagnant quickly, particularly after Mallory gets the hint that he won’t sleep with her. What this means is that the entire second act features Doug spending money to make the stripper’s life more manageable while she goes off to a motel room with a John. This doesn’t make for a terrific hour of cinema.
While Stewart’s performance is tolerable at best, the biggest disappointment is Gandolfini. It’s understandable that the actor would want to try a different type of character – even before The Sopranos he was playing tough guys in movies like True Romance and Get Shorty. But if he was trying to ease the transition by playing a nice guy who still spends time in strip clubs and cheats on his wife, then it was done poorly. There are a countless number of instances when it looks as though his most notable persona is going to break through, but it slowly burns away and buries itself under a forced southern accent.
While the individual characters are interesting, they become increasingly dull the more they interact. There isn’t a single move in the film that couldn’t have been predicted from the start and all of the tension is sucked out right from the start. This film looked as though it could been a great opportunity for two actors to show their depth beyond their notable roles, and, perhaps, with a better script it could have been.
For more coverage from the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival click here
