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Friday, March 17, 2006
Diesel makes 'Guilty' a pleasure
Not really a drama and not exactly a comedy, Sidney Lumet's dramatization of the real-life courtroom showdown between New Jersey's warriors on crime and a veritable platoon of indicted mob figures is a highly entertaining look at the bigger-than-life trial that turned into the longest criminal trial in U.S. history.
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The centerpiece of Lumet's story (which he also co-wrote) is Jackie DiNorscio (Vin Diesel, with a thinning head of hair), a fun-loving, hard-partying small-time mob lieutenant given 30 years for drug dealing. Diesel's Jackie is a teddy bear of a bad boy whose family devotion is genuine, even if he is a screw-up as a husband and father.
Jackie doesn't just turn down the D.A.'s offer to rat on his family for a reduced sentence, he decides to represent himself with a mix of class clowning and street-level straight talk.
"Find Me Guilty" is deeply mired in the romance of goombah loyalty and crime-family ties that "The Sopranos" has all but put to rest. Lumet's easygoing direction and swinging score give the somewhat comically exaggerated characters a rascally harmlessness out of touch with the realities of organized crime.
It shouldn't work, but the story runs on pure Diesel. Freed from the terse, tight-lipped cool of his action roles, Diesel is an absolutely engaging performer with a "dese and doze and whadda youze want" cadence. Jackie's life-of-the-party charm fills the courtroom with a warm earnestness, punctuated by jury-winning jokes lobbed at the D.A., the witnesses, even the judge (Ron Silver, whose quiet authority makes him no one's straight man).
The lack of irony, let alone ambiguity, in an upside world in which mobsters are the underdogs, should sink the film, but Lumet's laid-back professionalism and Diesel's big-hearted performance give it an affable buoyancy.
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