About My Father stars Sebastian Maniscalco as himself and Robert De Niro as his Italian father Salvo. They are invited to a Fourth of July celebration at his girlfriend Ellie’s family country club. Although they come from vastly different backgrounds, they all come to learn a lot about themselves and each other.
This is kind of a hard movie to review for me. My theater was mainly older people who enjoyed the movie and the jokes. Even scenes that were meant to be heartfelt, people were dying laughing at. For me, I didn’t have that same level of enjoyment.
Maybe I wasn’t feeling it today, but the jokes didn’t land for me. Comedy is subjective, which is fine, but the lack of variety just irked me. A couple of dick and ball jokes here and a lot of “old Italian man doesn’t understand the rich culture” jokes there and I got tired of them fast. Sebastian narrates the entire movie and I can tell he did stand up just by the cadence of how he spoke.
The story itself is pretty basic. It’s kind of a fish-out-of-water story that relied on De Niro acting as if he has never heard of the idea of a tab. De Niro himself had most of the enjoyable moments of the movie but it felt like he cranked the Italian up to 11 and let it ride the entire -son movie. He and Sebastian had a passable father-son relationship, but there were multiple times when Sebastian called him “man” and not “dad” or “father” which stuck out to me.
The characters were also very basic. With a movie like this, it felt like every person was just defined by one trait. Like with Ellie’s rich family, there is the weird son, the normal daughter, and the douchebag older brother. I wasn’t expecting any sort of depth given the trailers but it was a little disappointing.
About My Father struggled to balance its tone. The structure is nothing I haven’t seen before but there were multiple times where the movie just cuts from a comedic scene to an emotional one. It would happen with no transitions and left me a little confused about how I was supposed to feel.
It wasn’t all bad though. As someone who also came from Italian immigrants, I could appreciate the mannerisms and some of the inside jokes. I didn’t have any expectations of liking this movie but there were some fun moments.
Final Thoughts
Is About My Father a movie I liked? Not really. Would my dad like this? Absolutely. Not every movie is going to be enjoyed by everyone, and even though I didn’t enjoy it, others did. I don’t think I’d go out of my way to see this again but if my dad put it on, I’d sit down and watch it with him.
