The foul mouthed holiday film is now, more or less, a cinema tradition.
From Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa to National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation to Harold Ramis’s The Ice Harvest, there are plenty of these anti-Christmas yet still kinda Christmas movies across all genres. Smart-ass action movies like Die Hard, most of the work of Shane Black, but also gruesome slasher pictures like Black Christmas, edgy Amblin' movies like Gremlins, and even Stanley Kubrick’s unclassifiable psychodrama Eyes Wide Shut. There is something about subverting that supposedly wholesome and giving holiday spirit into some alternate kind of energy that filmmakers keep coming back to.
Dito Montiel’s effervescent yet surprisingly violent black comedy noodles around in this this space, to mixed effect. It is set in the week-long gap between Christmas and New Years, and takes place mostly in wealthy, upstate, New England cottage country. Where the cottages are really just Estate Homes with no gates, and dirt roads.
A-list character actors, including Ed Harris, Jennifer Coolidge, Gabrielle Union and Bill Murray speak in foul, highly mannered verbiage that recalls that period at the end of the 1990s when everyone was trying (unsuccessfully) to capture the ‘movie-ness’ of Pulp Fiction. In other words, Riff Raff does not want you to take anything too seriously.
And yet it does want you to take it seriously enough. The screenplay, written by John Pollono, leans none-to-subtly into sins of the fathers and transgressions of sons. It ruminates on the difficult work of parenting, not only at the beginning of the journey, but all the glorious, spectacular failures along the way. It picks at the eventual need to cobble together some kind of understanding, a narrative as adults, to figure out what makes these unshakable family bonds worth fighting for, given that modern family is so often such a mess.
The story is structured in such a way that, while it mainly stays in the vein of ‘family comes home for the holidays and hashes things out in the living-room and kitchen,’ that flashbacks, flash-forwards, a trips into town, and many bomb-dropping confessional asides, Riff Raff offers more plot reveals, and character twists, than your average mystery movie or paranoid thriller. It is also quite gory in a dead-pan macabre way. If nothing else, it is a hard movie to pin down, tonally.
Ed Harris plays Vince, a gruff but simple (beer drinking) man who used to paint houses for the mob, who has successfully managed to extricate himself from both his gristly career, as well as his first marriage to Ruth (Jennifer Coolidge). He re-married into money with Sandy (Gabrielle Union) and adopted her lavish lifestyle along with her son DJ, which gave him a second lease on life -- to be a gentler father-figure, after messing up Rocco, his son from Ruth.
Rocco is on the run, fleeing the city, with his ‘about to pop’ pregnant girlfriend, Marina, after an altercation with Lefty (Bill Murray), or more specifically, Lefty’s son, and Marina’s former boyfriend. He has also drugged and kidnapped his mother for some reason, and Ruth is none too pleased about this. In a very cheerfully-acidic-but-vaguely-cluelees Jennifer Coolidge kind of way, she lets everyone know it. Oh, and Lefty used to be Vince’s partner and bestie.
Pete Davidson also shows up as Lefty's heavy, who also happens to love Ruth's cooking.
This all culminates in a convoluted hostage situation turned shoot-em-up, that perhaps more than anything recalls Ted Demme’s The Ref. That film was also chock full of character actors -- fun aside: back in the day, I always confused Christine Baranski and Jennifer Coolidge, so this is kind of full circle on that bit of trivia -- and both it and Riff Raff attempt the dicey business of attempting an uplifting holiday ending after spewing hostility, and contempt (with a side dish of class warfare) at the audience.
I do not think Montiel and his talented, admittedly fun to watch, cast are quite up to the the task to pulling off a classic here. However, The Ref has aged shockingly well in the last 30 years, so maybe I am off base here. Ho Ho Ho.