Review of Two Family House (2000) by Yury M — 26 Mar 2008

Two Family House belongs to a rare breed of movies. I had not heard of it until I read Adam Duritz praise it as one of his favorite movies. It feels very mid-nineties but it was actually released in 2000.

There is this special truthfulness to this film largely due to the fact that the director is the nephew of the main character in the movie. I love how the story develops as a story would in real life.

Events are not fabricated to portray a certain concept or to provide an emotional punch where the formula demands it. Instead, the film is inhabited with real people with real problems. Sure some of the problems are not the every-day stuff that we have to deal with, which certainly makes it for a more exciting film.

There is an Italian-American man in the 70s that almost had a breakthrough in the music business but was shut down by his wife who has since allowed him to open other businesses, all of which failed, and now he buys a house for his family with a separate apartment upstairs intending to live there while operating a bar downstairs -another of his entrepreneurial passions, unsuspecting that the current dwellers of the upstairs apartment not only would refuse to move out but the woman would give birth to a baby, half-white half-black, therefore presenting a complicated range of decisions to our hero who is already overwhelmed with life but not without hope and ambitions which lead him to developing a relationship with the biracial baby's mother, who, I forgot to mention, is Irish.

Whew.. So yes, there is this Italian-American man in a relationship with an Irish-American woman who has an African-American-Irish-American baby. Everything is possible in this land of opportunity! The cast is composed of many faces familiar to those who watched The Sopranos.

The pacing is nice and easy, the voiceover is pleasant, the jazz music is cool, the chemistry between main actors is real. Thank you, Mr. Duritz! I loved it!