Set in the early Fifties, Buddy Visalo (Michael Rispoli) is a slightly overweight, chain-smoking factory worker who had one shot at becoming a kind of Frank Sinatra. But he blew it and married the hen-pecking Estelle (Katherine Narducci), who soon realises he’s a dreamer, not to mention a bit dim.
But Buddy never stops trying things to get himself out of their situation. In the process he does that one, unacceptable thing for an American: he fails. In fact, he even fails to produce offspring.
Post-war United States is rich, powerful and confident. But life putters on in this working-class area where the men graft hard and drink even harder in their local Italian-American pub, while the women sit and gossip at their local Italian-American coffee shop.
It’s all fairly funny in a Reader’s Digest “Life’s like that” kind of way, but this is ultimately what the Beat Generation howled against. Dominating these people’s skyline is a bridge: black, mechanical and ugly.
Upstairs in the run-down house Buddy has bought, which he plans to turn into a pub where he can sing those dreamy songs, lives an old Irish soak and his young, pregnant and uppity wife, Mary O’Neary (a spirited performance from Kelly Macdonald).
She is carrying the narrator and central protagonist or antagonist, depending on your politics, of this painfully simple tale. This “character”, an uncredited Frank Whaley, is the bridge as such.
As time slowly passes, as it did it back in the Fifties, it transpires that Buddy has that one quality (it would be a crime to call it a commodity) that Kurt Vonnegut says we can all do with. What writer/director Raymond de Felitta manages to convey with quiet brilliance is that “common decency” doesn’t necessarily equate with suburban complacency.
On the contrary, it makes for the social revolutions, if not human miracles, that transcend both the pomposity of media-driven religious and political ambitions, regardless of sides. The strange thing is that one comes out of this movie recognising some very good people — quiet revolutionaries — not in the movies, but in the living flesh.
Womad takes place from September 28 to 30 at the Bluegum Creek Estate in Benoni. There will be no performances on Friday. A two-day pass for Saturday and Sunday costs R185. Tickets for Saturday only are R120 and for Sunday R85. Booking is at Ticketweb 0861Â 400Â 500.