A homeless puppy of a movie, set on Staten Island in the mid-Fifties, and centered around the one nice guy (Michael Rispoli) in a circle of Italian-American lunkheads, his henpecking ballbusting wife (Katherine Narducci), and an immigrant Irish expectant mother (Kelly Macdonald) whose drunken-bum husband abandons her as soon as the baby proves to be of mixed race. The baby narrates the tale in a grown-up, know-it-all voice ("It remains an undisputed fact that every man has one moment of total selflessness in his life"), and a couple of scenes shift into grainy home-movie footage for Baby's Earliest Memories. Its mother is, or starts out as, a penniless tenant in the hero's newly purchased fixer-upper. What to do? What to do? What ... to ... do...? The moral dilemma -- if any -- boils down to a choice between, on one side, a claw-hammer face and a New Yawk honk ("Dat puttan'! Dat whoo-ah! Dat niggah-luvvah!"), and on the other side a Cover Girl complexion and a Celtic lilt. Take an hour and a half to mull it. Written and directed by Raymond De Felitta. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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