Product Details

• Released on: 2001-05-29
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Widescreen, NTSC, Import
• Original language: English
• Running time: 108 minutes

From Amazon.com
Raymond De Felitta's Sundance 2000 Audience Winner is a sweet little romantic drama set in the insular Italian and Irish neighborhoods of 1956 Staten Island. Narrated with the conversational ease of a bar story, it stars Michael Rispoli as Buddy, blue-collar Italian American with big dreams, a golden voice, and a history of failed business schemes. His latest scheme involves turning a two-story firetrap into a bar with an upstairs apartment, but first he has to evict the squatters he inherited with the house: an abandoned young Irish mother (Kelly Macdonald) and her half-black child. Guilty over his hardhearted decision, he sets them up in an apartment and essentially adopts them. An unlikely friendship begins in clashes and verbal fireworks and turns into a gentle romance while Buddy confronts his own prejudice and smothering cultural values.

De Felitta is uncharacteristically generous to both his clannish working-class chorus and Buddy's wife Estelle (Kathrine Narducci, from The Sopranos), who undermines her spouse's efforts and ridicules his ambition out of sheer conformism. Rispoli, by contrast, is accepting and warm as a guy hungry for his piece of the American dream, and Macdonald's scrappy single mom is full of Irish dander that melts into a romantic sparkle and loving support. Two Family House is inspired by the true story of writer-director De Felitta's uncle, and there's an engaging modesty and loving understanding in this portrait of one man's rebellion against the stifling values and judgmental intolerance of his community. --Sean Axmaker

Review
A movie of disarming sweetness, Raymond De Felitta's Two Family House is as accomplished as it is unassuming. A period piece set in 1950s Staten Island, the movie tells the story of Buddy (Michael Rispoli), a working-class family man whose kindness -- he secretly subsidizes an adulterous Irish woman (Kelly McDonald) who has just given birth to a dark-skinned baby -- leads to pariah status in his insular Italian-American neighborhood. Casually humanistic, the movie's depiction of an ethnic community has the warm finish of fondly remembered lore. For all its seemingly fuzzy nostalgia, Two Family House serves as a corrective to idealized representations of the 1950s as a simpler (and hence, better) time. Underlying the movie's action is the neighborhood's blithe racism, which when it erupts casually in everyday banter is genuinely jarring. Made with evident affection, Two Family House makes a couple of lapses into preciousness -- a sequence depicting the narrator's first memories as an infant comes to mind -- and sometimes verges on caricature. Considering the number of opportunities the story presents for such missteps, however, the movie is impressively free of bathos and cynicism. With its generosity and unforced moralizing, Two Family House seems oddly anachronistic: a modest, humane movie about nothing less than the values we choose to live by. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide

On the DVD
cc16x9 widescreen (1.85:1)
English & Spanish subtitles

Customer Reviews

2 Family House.
A married Italian man falls in love with an Irish woman whose husband left because she gave birth to a black baby! All of this occurs in 1950's Staten Island.

You'll recognize many of the cast members from the Sopranos, but this is no mafia story.

Michael Rispoli is excellent in his search for happiness amid a variety of social issues faced. Marital, familial, ethnic and racial relations are all explored, and the result is a warm, funny and entertaining movie.