Mighty Fine is a
mess of a film with a real firecracker of a performance from its lead, which
would probably put it on the fast track to the Oscars if it had a larger budget
and a major studio push. That
still doesn't excuse the fact that it's a mess of a film with a single great
performance. It's Chazz Palminteri
pulling the weight of the world here as Joe Fine, the ill-tempered but
well-meaning patriarch of a family otherwise populated by women"”subtle!
Clumsily narrated by an elder version of youngest daughter
Natalie (Jodelle Ferland, so wonderful in Terry Gilliam's Tideland), Mighty Fine
charts the Jewish Brooklyn family's resettlement in New Orleans. For a while, it seems that Joe is the
perfect husband to Stella (Andie MacDowell) and the coolest possible dad for
Natalie and Maddie (Rainey Qualley).
It's supposed to seem that way, at least, until five minutes into the
film everyone makes special note of the panic button on the staircase of the
family's new home. Wonder if
that's going to get used!
Even without delving into the
press notes, which audiences aren't privy to, one can tell that Debbie Goodstein's
film is semi-autobiographical"”ostensibly because of the period setting but also
because of apparent protagonist Natalie's stunning overconfidence in her own
writing. Repetitive, hilariously
blunt, and edited with a distractingly high ratio of fades to cuts, not much
about Mighty Fine should logically
work until Palminteri is on screen.
He sells what the rest of the film can't by creating a strangely
empathetic tyrant in Joe, a man who claims to love his family, but behaves with
a cruel selfishness. As the film
unfolds, his tantrums become more frequent, but Palminteri never makes them any
less alarming"”and sometimes devastatingly sad. When Joe looks down on the women of his family from atop a
staircase and snarls, "I hate my life", it's so powerful it may as well be from
a different film than the one that surrounds it.
