Made in Italy, review: Liam Neeson dries his tears by renovating a Tuscan villa
Dir: James D’Arcy. Cast: Liam Neeson, Micheál Richardson, Valeria Bilello, Lindsay Duncan. No cert, 94 mins.
While watching Made in Italy, you may find yourself wishing the current ban on foreign travel were extended to “fictional characters played by Liam Neeson”. This syrupy film sees the Taken star pootle off to Tuscany in the role of Robert, a widowed artist in a creative slump who has returned to his late wife’s homeland to refurbish a villa they once shared. In the 20 years since her death, the house has been left to crumble picturesquely, but the time has come to redecorate and move on.
Why now? Because Robert’s semi-estranged son Jack – played by Neeson’s own eldest son Micheál Richardson – needs the money. The younger man is going through an unpleasant divorce, and wants to buy the gallery he runs from his wife so he doesn’t lose his career into the bargain. So together, father and son laboriously set about turning Casa del Metaphor back into a functioning family-home, patching up plasterwork, evicting wildlife, and excavating a couple of decades’ worth of unaddressed guilt and grief.
Any further plot summary at this point would be superfluous, since you already know everything that happens – and I do mean everything – in the 85 or so remaining minutes. Yes, the house contains a locked room of memories, the discovery of which causes Jack to cry to Robert: “It’s like you literally locked up all of my memories!” Yes, Jack meets and falls for a comely local girl (Valeria Bilello) who makes a mean risotto, but comes with baggage of her own.
Yes, the sale of the house is taken on by a peppery expat estate-agent (Lindsay Duncan) who starts reeling off complaints before she’s even got out of the car, but eventually comes to recognise the property’s tumbledown charms. (Her story might have been the central one in a smarter version of the film.) Yes, there is a bleak and splattery indoor mural over which Robert refuses to paint, and around which the rest of the refurb must awkwardly work. Will they end up selling the house after all? What do you think?
Made in Italy is the directorial and screenwriting debut of the Broadchurch and Dunkirk actor James D’Arcy, but it feels more like a missing subplot from Love Actually than any kind of passion project in itself. Of course, aspects of the premise chime sadly with the personal lives of its two stars: Neeson’s wife and Richardson’s mother, the actress Natasha Richardson, died in 2009. But while Richardson is perfectly fine, and Neeson expertly finds the right tone for the project at hand – light, rather than comic – there is no observable spark, let alone a cathartic resonance, between material and cast.
Instead, it’s all a bit redolent of Richard Curtis on an off-day, from the postcard-shallow treatment of the Tuscan countryside and its residents to the ambient mood of aspirational heartbreak, and even the sporadic, blundering attempts at earthiness, such as the following line solemnly intoned by Neeson on returning from a visit to the bathroom: “I wouldn’t go in there for a while if I were you. There’s a large weasel in the sink. And that’s not a euphemism.”
Those in the market for domestic drama, sexual tension and humorous mishaps against a backdrop of sawing and sweeping would be advised to try any home renovation show over this.
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