MiraJeff Reviews A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS!!

Greetings AICN, MiraJeff here with A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, the impressive feature debut from writer-director Dito Montiel who gives his own memoir the big screen treatment. The film won Montiel the Best Director award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and as far as I’m concerned Sundance knows what it’s doing when anointing the next director to watch. Remember the previous year’s winner was Jeff Feurzeig who crafted the superb documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, which joins AGTRYS as one of the top ten films released so far this year. So the lights went down, the screen lit up, and the camera slowly focused on Dianne Wiest, making an emotional phone call to her adult son, pleading with him to come home and take his stubborn father, Monty (Chazz Palmintieri), to the hospital. I swear to God, right then and there, I turned to my roommate and said “I am going to love this movie.” It literally took 30 seconds to hit me, 30 seconds to leave its mark on me forever. Honestly, it was the same knowing feeling I felt when I walked out of Crash last April. We’re told it is July, 1986 and we’re in Astoria, Queen, where we meet Shia LeBeouf who addresses the camera directly and says, “My name is Dito and I am going to leave everybody in this film.” Cut to adult Dito (Robert Downey Jr.), at first nothing more than a smoky silhouette, preparing to read passages of his memoir to a captive off-screen audience. Watching Downey as Montiel muster the courage to read the searing words of his heart-breakingly honest story is a thing of triumphant beauty. Once the ball gets rolling, we’re warned within the first few minutes that characters will die. Ugly things will happen in this film. Childhood and real life aren’t pretty here. Things don’t change or get better, stagnant neighborhoods remain stuck in their ways. Characters are filled with such self-loathing they can’t even communicate with one another, forever changed by grief and guilt. I’m about to delve into the story although I think this film will play even better if you know next to nothing about it. The characters are all based on real people although there are events that are admittedly fictionalized. It’s basically about Dito and his Good Will Hunting-group of friends. Think about it, there’s Dito, the intelligent but troubled protagonist; Antonio, who like Chuckie, would take a bat to the head of anyone messin’ with Dito; there’s Nerf (Peter Anthony Tambakis), the runt of the crew, aka Morgan; and there’s Antonio’s crazy younger brother, Giuseppe (Adam Scarimbolo), who tempts fate by throwing knives at his girl friends and lying down on railroad tracks. I’m not exactly sure how that relates to Cole Hauser, but they both sort of embody a push-me-and-I’ll-push-you-back-harder attitude. Change the British love interest the main character loves but keeps pushing away to a Puerto Rican love interest and substitute Robin Williams the shrink for Chazz the dad and there you go. It’s a long, belabored, imperfect analogy but it kind of works if you ask me. Like its characters, the film isn’t perfect. Structurally it’s all over the place, with scenes starting and stopping with no rhyme, reason, or rhythm. In fact, and this is strictly a matter of personal preference, but I don’t think Montiel needed to flash-forward at all. I don’t think we need to see Dito as an adult because I think the early years speak for themselves. We already know that nothing is going to change. We know that Dito’s friend will still be living with his mother, and that his childhood sweetheart will still hang out over the same stoop. It’s a given, so why take precious screentime away from the heart of the story, young Dito and his pals, for the sake of finding out how it all affects them later. I’m not doing a great job of explaining why I feel this way, but it’s hard to articulate. You’ll have to see it for yourself to be able to judge whether or not it was necessary to see these characters as adults. Rosario Dawson for instance, pops up late in the game as the wise sage who might know Dito better than himself. She delivers a sobering taste of reality and despite not seeing each other for decades, it’s like they never missed a beat. Her character is like the mirror Dito holds up in front of his face, reflecting what his life really looks like. She gives it to him straight, and encourages him to confront his demons, rather than just writing a one-sided book about them. When he comes back to the neighborhood as an acclaimed author, you can see he’s kind of got a chip on his shoulder, like he’s ashamed of where he came from, but the past in his rear view mirror only makes his accomplishments that much more incredible. But the real reason to See AGTRYS is the magnificent performances by nearly the entire ensemble cast. I’ve watched LeBeouf come of age and gradually grow more comfortable in his own skin, from Even Stevens to The Greatest Game Ever Played, but here, he absolutely blew me away. For me, this was a Leo in Gilbert Grape level performance. And let me tell you something about Channing Tatum. With anger and intensity to spare, this kid is the raw, real deal. He just pulled a mini-Leo by turning Step Up into a surprise hit at the summer box office thanks to his appeal to teenage girls, but I’ll be damned if a whole bunch of rabid, pissed-off teenage guys don’t remember him after this movie. He’s electric as the macho asshole who acts as Dito’s best friend and big brother, a guy who solves problems with fists and only knows two things, loyalty and anger. He’s a street brawler and Palmintieri seems to respect him more because of it. Speaking of Palmintieri, he’s as good as he’s ever been despite lapsing into a bad Christopher Walken once or twice. We first see Palmintieri in his humble kitchen, sitting in his chair as if it were a throne, acting like a king in his castle, only this castle has no fan and if you’ve ever spent a summer in a Queens apartment without any form of AC, it’s simply torture. He fancies himself The Rock of Gibraltar, an immovable object, like how he thinks of Dito. “You live here, you die here,” he tells his son. Wiest is equally strong and most impressive during an incredibly powerful scene with Downey late in the film, as they talk about Dito’s father and how much he loved his only son before the apple turned its back on the tree from which it hung. If I have one complaint it’s that Dito grows up thinking that his father never loved him, when I thought it was quite clear that he actually did. Dito comes across like he has all the answers, like he operates on a higher plateau, but he doesn’t. If anything he should consider himself blessed to have such loving parents, a father who doesn’t beat him like Antonio’s. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is undoubtedly one of the best films of the year. It is a near masterpiece of independent filmmaking and should be hailed as a triumph on nearly every creative level. There are some odd editing choices to say the least, but some really work, like a seizure scene that fades in and out. I happened to like the words on the page appear on screen, although I could see how some people may be distracted. The scene turns out to be a combination of gripping, compelling, and harrowing, I just didn’t want to have to pick one adjective. Powerful is probably best though many more are appropriate. The narrative is unconventional and sort of shapeless but the story is so fascinating its construction doesn’t really matter, just the seething elegance of many of the scenes. Children have remarkably frank discussions about sex and the dialogue is brutally honest and stinging and rough around the edges. This is unconventional, nontraditional storytelling at its best, a work of such honesty and maturity that to merely recommend it would be doing it a disservice. You must go see A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, even if I don’t really know what the hell that title means. It’s funny, it’s charming, it’s brutal, it’s gut-wrenching, it’s all of those things and a whole lot more. Other critics have said the film evokes memories of early Scorsese and the comparisons aren’t far off, but it isn’t important whether or not Montiel echoed Martin the Master intentionally or merely accidentally, because the work stands on its own. Dito Montiel is a filmmaker we will surely hear from again, and I for one, can’t wait for his next knockout effort. Filmmaking is a personal process but when it’s done correctly, it can be enjoyed by a universal audience. There is no surefire demographic for this film, it speaks to people of all ages, races, and religions. It is a film for people who love stories, and it is an unforgettable story at that. That’ll do it for me, folks. For all the haters, mirajeff@aintitcool.com, cuz we all know the lovers are the silent type. And for those of you looking for my takes on The Science of Sleep and Employee of the Month, head on over to www.csindy.com, the official alternative weekly newspaper of Colorado Springs. ‘Til next time, this is MiraJeff signing off…