Word: niro
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...mother Caroline (Ellen Barkin) adrift in the West in the 1950s, looking for work. She's penniless, on the run from a broken marriage and an inappropriate lover. She has a good heart but not a very sensible one, and she falls in with Dwight Hansen (Robert De Niro), an auto mechanic from dreary Concrete, Washington...
...observed version of middle-class morality. Toby must have a paper route, but it is Dwight who pockets the profits. Toby must learn the manly art of self-defense, but mostly Dwight teaches him sucker punches and uses the lessons as an excuse to beat on the boy. De Niro's is a domineering performance, a star turn that is both comic and menacing, but it unbalances Wolff's story...
This is not De Niro's fault. The movie goes where movies must go: toward melodrama. And toward the current fashion (Jack the Bear, Radio Flyer) for taking up but not fully confronting child abuse. Something more subtle is going on in Wolff's book, a confrontation with a richer, quirkier past and his emerging self that the movie too often brushes aside...
...BOTTOM LINE: Robert De Niro's new anthology show is original and exciting; just please don't call it quality...
...ready for that word again. Tribeca, the first TV series from Robert De Niro's New York City-based Tribeca Productions, is sure to be hailed by critics as "quality" television. The term once conveyed innocent praise, but lately it has become freighted with sanctimoniousness -- a club to beat the heads of dopey network executives who won't renew Brooklyn Bridge. TV shows should not strive for "quality." They should strive to be good. Tribeca is a good show...