90 min | PG-13 | May 26, 2023 | Lionsgate
Sebastian Maniscalco brings his immigrant hairdresser father to a holiday weekend with his girlfriend’s old-money WASP family. Robert De Niro plays the dad as a man who refuses to be impressed by any of it. The clash writes itself, which turns out to be the problem.
Sebastian Maniscalco plays a version of himself, a Chicago hotel manager dating Ellie Collins, an artist from a family of inherited wealth. Ellie invites him to a Fourth of July weekend at the family estate. Sebastian drags his widowed father Salvo along, a Sicilian immigrant who cuts hair for a living and trusts nothing about these people. The film stages the collision between blue-collar immigrant pride and country-club WASP entitlement. It wants to be a movie about a son who learns to stop apologizing for where he comes from.
Robert De Niro plays Salvo as a man who weaponizes his work ethic and treats every luxury as a personal insult. He lands the few real laughs by underplaying the broad material. Sebastian Maniscalco plays himself as a bundle of nerves who narrates his own anxiety, and the performance never escapes the rhythm of a standup set. Leslie Bibb gives Ellie a warmth the script does not earn. Kim Cattrall plays Senator Tigger MacArthur with brittle frost while David Rasche plays patriarch Bill Collins as a hedge-fund cartoon. Anders Holm and Brett Dier reduce the Collins sons to broad sketches.
Director Laura Terruso shoots the estate in bright, glossy daylight that flattens every scene into a greeting-card sheen. The cinematography frames the Collins mansion like a real-estate listing and never finds a visual joke in the excess. Terruso paces the culture-clash set pieces with sitcom regularity, cutting to reaction shots on every punchline. The script by Sebastian Maniscalco and Austen Earl builds the comedy from his standup bits about his father and stretches them past their natural length. A pet peacock and a boat trip supply the physical comedy, and the editing telegraphs each disaster before it lands. The voiceover narration explains jokes the staging already made.
The film knows the shape of its ending before it begins. Salvo and the Collins patriarch will reach an understanding. Sebastian will learn to value his roots. Every beat arrives on schedule and lands soft. De Niro deserves a sharper vehicle for this character, and Maniscalco’s specific comic voice deserves a script that does more than transcribe it. About My Father settles for the warm and the familiar when the premise offered something with teeth.