King Of Staten Island Delivers Some Real Surprises!

King Of Staten Island(Video On Demand)

Starring  Pete Davidson,Marisa Tomei,Bill Burr,Bel Powley,Maude Apatow,Steve Buscemi

Directed  by  Judd Apatow

Rating: ***(3 stars)

I have a  confession to make.  love the cinema  of  Judd Apatow. It is nifty, knowledgeable, funny and  sad, all at the same time. This  time in King Of Staten Island , Apatow’s ‘hero’  is Scott ,an unlikely lanky loose-limbed   youngster with no ambitions  worth talking about .Well, he does want to be  a  tattoo  artiste while his dead father  was a legendary fireman on Staten Island, the  laconic location  where the  film serves up its   appetizing  dish which at first appears to be  junkfood but eventually proves itself  fairly nutritious .

 There  is a sassy appeal about  any story  of  a drifter finding his  bearings.  But this one  is  particularly  endearing. Pete Davidson  looks nothing like  the boy  that  your daughter can bring home to  her mother for dinner. He  is scruffy,  impolite, upstartish and, well,to cut a schlock story  short,   good for nothing.

Scott’s  journey  would have been a corny cliché   if  the screenplay didn’t look beyond the obvious  signposts to peek  into  the  innerworld  of   a father-less bloke who  doesn’t know what to do with  his life until his mom brings home a  boyfriend.The dramatic tension between Scott and  his mom’s  lover  Ray(Bill Burr) is  at once  devastatingly  funny and revealing.

It’s  a love triangle with a difference, rippling with a risible rotundity. Muscled with mirth  and armed with and anger , the film keeps you hissing happily to the end.

The scenes  of stress between the  son and  Mom’s BF   are impeccably  written to spotlight  the two overgrown boys’ determination to prove the other a villain.While  both  the male actors Davidson and Burr are  delightfully pugilistic, it is  ‘Mom’  Marisa Tomei  who steals  the show . Tomei, a terrific actress in the  best  of  times, brings a  kind of wisful wackiness to  her single mother’s role. No selfpity here , but loads of  assertive parenting.

You will love Tomei when at one point she throws  both beta and boyfriend out of her home and  shares drinks and laughter with  a female  friend instead.You will love the  air of  jaunty joy that this  wonderfully constructed coming-of-age drama constructs and  its wicked sense  of  humour  in  a  sequence like the one where Scott goes to his soon-to-be-stepdad’s ex-wife to dig up  dirt on him.

 She  gives him dirt all right. But the ex-wife also tells  Scott  why a  certain part of her ex-husband’s body makes her  forgive all his trespasses.

Life’s like that. Sometimes  it gets hard.