Welcome to the Rileys

The main achievement of Jake Scott's Welcome to the Rileys is that it manages to be new and original, touching and realistic, with seemingly overused material. There are many films about the two subjects employed within Rileys, these two being man who thinks he can save the down-on-her-luck hooker and the marriage that is slowly re-kindling. In the film, James Gandolfini plays Doug, with an aggressively non-Gandolfini accent that sometimes works, who goes down to New Orleans for a convention. Upon meeting a hooker named Mallory, Gandolfini inexplicably (to himself and the audience) sells his business, tells his wife he 'can't come home yet', and begins paying Mallory a hundred bucks a day to stay in her dilapidated apartment. As Doug fixes the place up and Mallory begins to slowly trust him, Doug's wife, played by Melissa Leo, ventures out of her house for the first time in years, and drives down to New Orleans. The interactions between the characters take the old clichés and turn them upside down, showing us truth despite triteness, and also showing truths that are hard to hear and accept. Mallory is played so well by Kristen Stewart as vulnerable and animal-like that the character becomes easy to relate to. Despite all of the odd decisions characters make (like Doug's decision to pay a hooker a hundred dollars a day to stay at her ramshackle house) the way the others react as if it were actually strange endears the film past the point where some films do things for no reason or to get a laugh, cry, or clap. Welcome to the Rileys is an imperfect film that employs some interesting takes at an old story. The acting is first-rate, but some of the subtleties that could have been made were never utilized. There needed to be a languor to Welcome to the Rileys rather than the slight pace it employed. It's still a good film.
Welcome to the Rileys: ★★★