In Welcome to the Rileys, James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo play Doug and Lois Riley, a long-married couple from Indiana who have grown perilously apart in the years following the death of their only daughter. Then Doug takes a business trip to New Orleans and crosses paths with Mallory (Kristen Stewart), an angry teenage runaway stripper/hooker. Long story short, he moves into Mallory's post-Katrina hovel to look after her — like she's a replacement daughter. Then Lois, formerly agoraphobic, drives south to reclaim her husband. And she too meets Mallory. Healing happens.
Had this glumly lit movie, directed by Jake Scott (son of Ridley Scott) from a script by Ken Hixon, been based on a novel or the archives of the long-running ''Can This Marriage Be Saved?'' column in Ladies' Home Journal, the filmmakers' attachment to arbitrary building blocks of plot might have been more forgivable. As an original indie drama, though, the overload of soapsuds (and the production's excessive attention to on-location squalor) at times overwhelms the earnest performances of the three very good lead actors, who work hard to convey the feelings of loss and loneliness that come from lack of communication. Incidentally, Rileys has been casually dubbed ''Kristen Stewart's stripper movie,'' but the handle doesn't stick: Stewart may wear skimpy clothes and grind once or twice from the neck down, but from the neck up she's all hollow, bruised eyes, twisted little mouth, and classic, coltish K-Stew rebellion. C+
MORE AFTER THE JUMP
James Gandolfini has a face as malleable as taffy. I have never seen him give a performance that didn't startle, transfix and thoroughly please me. Built like Humpty Dumpty, with a melting smile and a countenance so changeable and expressive that he can show several emotions at the same time, he is never less than irresistible. So good, in fact, that he can almost make a dreary disappointment like Welcome to the Rileysbearable. But not for long. Despite its good intentions, this earnest little film seems embalmed.
It begins with a typical dead-end evening in the unhappy life of Doug Riley, who spends every Thursday night stuck in the same routine—poker, waffles and sex with the waitress at the Pancake House. Doug owns a plumbing supply business in Indianapolis that offers no respite from a life consumed with mourning over the death of his daughter, Emily, in a car crash. At home, he sits in a dark garage and smokes forbidden cigarettes while his wife, Lois (the always reliable Melissa Leo), locks herself away, works on her ceramics, stares at the walls and sees images of Emily dancing across her eyeballs. She's a tortured agoraphobic who hasn't been out of the house in eight years. They're polite strangers, occupying the same empty space but joined together only by mutual loss. The holes in their hearts cannot be filled, so Doug looks beyond their tunnel vision for outside help when he attends a convention in New Orleans and becomes infatuated with a tough 16-year-old runaway stripper and borderline crack whore (Kristen Stewart, from vampire fame in the Twilight series), who is as lonely and lost as he is. It never occurs to anybody in this movie to call in a psychiatrist. Why settle for easy when there's so much pain just waiting to be experienced, like eating broken glass?
As Doug's paternal interest grows and a reluctant, mismatched relationship develops, the movie drags on, piling on one preposterous situation after another. He closes his business back home and offers the girl $100 a day, no strings attached, just to let him move into her sordid house with no electricity and a filthy toilet that's been stopped up for years. If that's not implausible enough, Lois suddenly drives all the way from Indiana to Louisiana, breathing into a paper bag to keep from hyperventilating. Now all three of them are making beds, painting walls and dusting the dirt in a faux family pretense as dopey as it is bizarre. Trying to save the girl from drugs and prostitution by forcing her to brush her teeth and sleep on clean sheets with hospital corners, Mrs. Riley dispenses advice on venereal disease, and Mr. Riley docks her a dollar every time she uses the F word. It has just the opposite effect of compassion, and just seems simple-minded and, frankly, funny in all the wrong places.
What keeps this leaden freighter afloat is the acting. Melissa Leo, in another gallant entry in her gallery of oddballs, and Mr. Gandolfini, eons away from his role in The Sopranos, bring nuance to the task of toting Ms. Stewart out of decadence and sin, but the sexy squalor of the Big Easy wins every time. The cheap glitter of New Orleans is an ornamental contrast to the numbness of Indianapolis, but practically no use is made of the colorful ambience it offers. This movie could just as well have been made in Pismo Beach. The whole thing makes you feel like you're stoned. By the time Lois says, "She's not Emily," and the Rileys head back home, you're too tired to mumble, "What took you so long?" You just wonder what Jake Scott, the director son of Ridley Scott, and Ken Hixon, the confused and inconsistent screenwriter, were smoking. Whatever it is, I'll have what they're having.
I want to say that “Welcome to the Rileys’’ stars two good actors and Kristen Stewart, but that’s not only mean, it misrepresents the case. This small, strange, achingly sincere character drama lets James Gandolfini flex his creative muscles by playing the kind of kindhearted soul Tony Soprano would probably back over on his way to the Pork Store. Melissa Leo once again invests a role with a weathered, naturalistic grace that you only notice afterward, like smoke in the air.
Stewart? As usual, she’s just there, but I can’t think of another young actress who makes her there-ness work so well. All three actors come at this gloomy, borderline-preposterous tale from different directions; that they meet up at all — and they do — is a tribute to sincerity and craft.
It’s a little harder for the audience. The story line invites such horselaughs that writer Ken Hixon and director Jake Scott handle it too gingerly, as if at the end of tongs. Gandolfini plays Doug Riley, an easygoing Indiana plumbing-supplies wholesaler whose marriage and life have drifted after the death of his teenage daughter in a car accident. His wife, Lois (Leo), has a simpler approach to grief: She hasn’t left the house in years.
The unexpected death of a waitress (Eisa Davis) with whom Doug was carrying on a casual affair sends him into a spiral; during a plumbing convention in New Orleans, he goes AWOL and into the orbit of Mallory (Stewart), a teen-runaway stripper with a mouth like a toilet and post-Katrina living arrangements that are like the toilet’s toilet.
Doug’s not interested in what Mallory’s selling; to her considerable confusion, he checks out of his hotel with the aim of fixing up her house and life. The early scenes between the two are awfully queasy, and they aren’t helped by Gandolfini’s come-and-go Southern accent. When Lois decides she has to see what her wayward husband is up to, though, “Welcome to the Rileys’’ takes on a peculiar and gentle charm. Watching Leo convey the character’s wonderment as she solves the puzzle of driving a car for the first time in a decade is very special indeed.
The director’s the son of Ridley Scott (“Alien,’’ “Gladiator’’), and it’s as if he had consciously set up camp far from dad’s turf. “Rileys’’ is slow and observant rather than slick and propulsive; it waits for the actors to bring it home rather than dazzling us with style. While there’s much to be said for that, real is one thing and forceful another, and the movie’s discreet humanism too often stays on the page.
Gandolfini and Leo still convince us there’s a genuine marriage there, with genuine affection underpinning it, and Stewart somehow builds a character out of her patented mix of shrugs and sullenness. The movie deglamorizes both Mallory and the actress playing her; by the final scenes, the character’s very much the raw adolescent the other two mistakenly see as a replacement daughter. As a whole, though, “Welcome to the Rileys’’ tiptoes around its emotions without ever committing to them. You’re glad it’s not “Tony and Bella’s Big Adventure’’ even as you suspect that might have been a lot more fun.
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