Culture Blues

Tribeca 2011: The Last Rites of Joe May

For the next month, Jeremiah and Jeff will be spending almost all of their free time watching and reviewing movies from this year's Tribeca Film Festival. It's about to get indie up in here!

Playing a humbled version of the steely-eyed tough guy he’s comfortably inhabited for what seems his entire career, Dennis Farina turns in a performance in The Last Rites of Joe May worthy of praise. If only that performance was part of a better film.

Farina, as the titular Joe, is an aging short-money mob hustler who leaves the hospital after a six week bout with pneumonia to find a world that assumed he was dead. His apartment has been rented out, his car towed, and all but a box of his worldly possessions left on the curb for trash. Despite most of his friends being dead or in retirement homes, an estranged son that won’t speak to him, and a boss that can barely muster contempt for the old man, Farina shows a stubborn refusal to be put out to pasture. Instead, he tries to get back into hustling, meanwhile befriending the young single mother that moved into his former apartment.

What follows is strictly deadbeat-makes-good boilerplate. Writer/director Joseph Maggio just doesn’t have any surprises up his sleeve. It’s a familiar story that Maggio tells without any particular verve. The dim photography, while certainly reinforcing the theme of creeping death, doesn’t do much to liven up the proceedings.

Fortunately, we have Farina. It’s nice when a character actor is able to take center stage, especially one like Farina whose work has been so consistently enjoyable. He’s made a career of embodying the goombah enforcer; slicked back hair, obnoxious tan, wrist dripping gold. With Joe May, Farina breaks years of typecasting down to its depressing conclusion. He’s a broken old man that the streets have forgotten, an absurdly retro leather jacket the only remaining scrap of the glamorous mobster image. Whether he’s schlepping sides of beef (the lowest of low hustles) or collapsing a lung on a run from the cops, Farina’s performance is wonderfully vulnerable, evocative of the horrors of old age, and the crushing realization that your life has amounted to very little.

VERDICT:  Skip it.

No matter how cool the jacket, old people are always sad.