“The King of Staten Island” (2020) Review
“The King of Staten Island” is a charming and heartfelt comedy that will push you to the limits of your infuriation. Pete Davidson’s naked, authentic, arrested development may make you rage until you scream.
Scott Carlin (Davidson) is a twenty-four-year-old stoner living at home with his mother Margie (Marisa Tomei) and sister Claire (Maude Apatow). Scott had defined his life by trauma, the unfathomable loss of his heroic fire-fighter father who died on the job when he was a young man. When Claire leaves for college and Margie finds a new man Ray (Bill Burr) Scott’s constant cycle of weed, video games and perpetual static motion gets shaken off its axis.
In Pete Davidson’s stand-up special “Alive From New York” there’s something so delightfully out of rhythm. His delivery laced with anxiety and when he’s alone on stage, and there’s an amplification of that energy - it endears. Armed with nothing but his words you bear the brunt of the young comic’s vulnerability and imperfection.
In “King” it’s a more infuriating prospect. In essence writers, Apatow, Davidson and Dave Sirius painstakingly create Scott’s millennial malaise, the sallow and drained corpse grey aesthetic of Staten Island is a cloud of gloom. Starting in true Apatow fashion - Scott has a team of strange, dead-end, pot hazed friends - like madmen in an isolation bunker. This misfit bunch have a kinship.
Scott’s amorality for amusement - attempting to tattoo primary school kid and blaming the symptoms of his mental state on hard-working mother Margie (Tomei) and somewhat neglected and yet independent sister Claire (Apatow) - is hard to watch. The movie is that mess of gritted teeth and lasts far longer than it has any right to. It’s an Apatow collaboration that, sort of, makes sense to have the navel-gazing rumination - it is, after all, Davidson’s semi-autobiographical account - but the humour and the timing and the damned punch that this thing could pack with more economy and less endurance feels apparent.
The performances of the cast that populate the movie are damned superb. Steve Buscemi’s Papa bursts with humanity, calm, gravitas and seniority - it’s the most authentically “him” - or what you can assume from consuming so many interviews featuring the real guy.
Bill Burr’s performance as Ray Bishop is terrific. The thing that works so beautifully is that he’s a giant pain in the arse, he’s got a hair-trigger, and has clearly dulled his reflexes to deliver humour at the pace of a standard ballbusting dude - but he’s a fuck up too. To a varying degree; and finding a connection with Scott’s mother Margie (Tomei) is his path back to a regular type life outside of the camaraderie of the firehouse.
Bel Powley’s Kelsey is terrific. She’s sweet, charming, empathetic and has a kind of punk rock attitude toward her home town. Rather than accept the manifest destiny that it’s a giant garbage dump forever, she sees it as a quintessential ‘fixer-upper’ - her passions for improvement projects also apply to her love life.
Tomei is in an absolute purple patch, finding all manner of ways to smother her natural glow and evergreen beauty to embrace her age. She wears the mileage of widow Margie Carlin, a two job nurse with a deadbeat anchor of a son. Maude Apatow’s Claire, whether intended or accidental - has natural imperfections in her manner, her pleading and arguments with Scott - her older f*ck up of a brother work beautifully. A mother like Leslie Mann should make her timing and reflexes for funny and forthright easy to access.
Davidson embraces his performance by embracing Scott’s hopelessness. His total lack of awareness when it comes to how deplorable he’s acting - is a source of humour. There’s either a charm or funny, and never the two shall meet.
The challenge for the undertaking is authentically shackling you to the experience of Davidson’s character. It’s an endurance test of his numbingly passive and depressive drawl to kill time until life is well and truly over. It isn’t fun, and in the grand spectrum of experience in 2020, it grows more tiresome than the filmmakers could have ever imagined.
Thankfully, there’s a periodic explosive relief. Imagine being submerged to the point that you think you cannot hold your breath. Just as the ache and the hurt sets in, someone grabs you and makes you stay below the surface for another 30 seconds. The panic relents the moment you crack the surface, each inhalation is exultant. Apatow and cinematographer Robert Elswit find these moments in Scott’s tale. First, a wild college party full of hope and abandon - the cynical world is held at bay by the swarm of weed delivery devices that look like science fair submissions, hastily downed shots, dancing and kisses from a stranger. The firehouse too, with the engines at its heart adds entirely new energy to the movie. Apatow and Elswit find the feeling of home that no other space has in the film. The structure, the care, the energy of the cast in the area - it’s a space for everyday heroes.
“The King of Staten Island” like its subject (Davidson) will test your patience, and yet it lingers long in your memory. You want this pot hazed; shitty tattoo tapestry ne’er do well to get his shit together. Hell, you might be related to pot hazed ne’er do well, as I am, and be inspired to check-in. Clenched and prepared for the worst, but hoping for the best.
★★½/★★★★
[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azkVr0VUSTA&w=854&h=480]
