Family First

Part of my coverage of the 54th Chicago International Film Festival.

FAMILY FIRST   **

Sophie Dupuis

2018

IDEA:  The allegiances of a crime family begin to unravel when JP, the eldest son, starts to have compunctions about his work, while his younger brother inversely becomes more reckless and remorseless. 

BLURB:  Théodore Pellerin’s performance in Family First is the kind of floridly affected overacting that threatens to tear right through a film, making the audience wonder how much of the style is intentional and how much of it is an actor grossly overshooting, completely out of sync with the movie they’re in. Pellerin’s Vincent is introduced as the lanky, rambunctious loose canon to his fuller and more reserved criminal brother, so that sense of incongruity at least primes us for the film’s central family conflict. Needling and ostentatious, not to mention so childishly volatile and heedless he randomly head-butts strangers at parties, Vince is a mephitic nuisance the family has grown increasingly and conspicuously wary of. Played by Pellerin with a permanent joker’s grin, musical theater cadences, and wild gesticulations, one is as apt to question the character’s mental wellness as they are the actor’s method and aims. As it turns out, this unhinged performance does gradually make sense to the film’s narrative, the idea becoming clear by at least the second time Vince snuggles up in bed with his mother that this is Pellerin’s interpretation of an emotionally stunted ne’er-do-well, desperately clung to the teat of the crime family unit that has nurtured him since infancy and maniacally unwilling to let it go. In a way, then, the actor achieves a kind of extra-textual, puncturing effect that adds to the characterization: Vincent is an unruly agitator who is both a threat inside the narrative and to it, an excess neither the family nor the fiction can contain. Pellerin is really the only thing the otherwise stodgily directed Family First has going for it, and his histrionics – however relatively befuddling, irritating, or fascinating they are to a given viewer – can only take it so far.