October 1, 1993 | During an intense heat wave in the summer of 1949, some cardplayers in New York’s Little Italy go a little crazy. Joseph Santangelo (Vincent D’Onofrio), a sly and charming butcher who never keeps his thumb far from his scale, proposes a bet: If he loses, he will give his fellow pinochle players a blast of cold air from his meat locker. But if he wins, then appliance repairman Lino Falconetti (Victor Argo) has to give Joseph something far more valuable: his daughter, Catherine (Tracey Ullman).
What happens next? Well, it’s like someone says very early in Household Saints — “Man deals, God stacks the deck.” Joseph wins the hand, marries Catherine, and sets into motion the kind of weirdly magical tragicomedy that neighbors continue to talk about for years and years.
Household Saints actually begins with some neighbors sharing the story with each other, setting the perfect anecdotal tone for a film that is a tall tale exceedingly well told.
This is a precisely detailed and quietly terrific little movie that’s large enough to contain three generations of life, love, death and pinochle. Gracefully directed by Nancy Savoca, who co-wrote the screenplay based on Francine Prose’s well-regarded novel, it is an endlessly fascinating and utterly captivating mix of the sacred and the mundane.
The vibrantly written and vitally acted characters are full of surprises, beginning with Joseph himself. For all his cocksure cynicism and macho posturing, he is insightful enough to appreciate the drab-looking but sharp-witted Catherine as a prize worth seeking. For her part, Catherine overcomes her resentment over being won in a pinochle game, and works hard at being a good wife. Unfortunately, she’s a terrible cook. Even more unfortunately, Carmela (Judith Malina), her overbearing Old World mother-in-law, never lets her forget it.
Carmela is an oppressively devout Catholic who harbors bizarre superstitions. She converses regularly with her dead husband and warns her pregnant daughter-in-law that, if she isn’t sufficiently prayerful, she will give birth to a chicken. When Carmela passes away, she frees Joseph and Catherine to literally bring color back into their lives. But Carmela’s spirit lives on, sort of, in Teresa (Lili Taylor), her granddaughter, who devoutly hopes to become a saint.
As the obsessively selfless Teresa, Taylor strikes a wonderfully deft balance of the batty and the beatific, suggesting that, in the 20th century, a genuine saint might seem more than a little nutty.
One of the many wonderful things about Household Saints is Savoca’s ease at presenting the most extraordinary events within ordinary contexts. (She is far less successful at detailing the flat-out looniness of Catherine’s Madame Butterfly-fixated brother.) At one point, a smiling Jesus Christ appears to Teresa while she’s ironing shirts for her boyfriend (Michael Imperioli). Savoca leaves it up to us to decide whether Teresa is imagining things or really enjoying a manifestation of the divine. But you can’t help feeling that, if something like this actually would happen, it probably would happen pretty much like this. Why not?
