It happens all the time. A young actress gets tied to a tween-friendly phenomenon, then tries to break free from it by taking her clothes off and taking on more adult fare, thinking a mere nip slip will give us cinematic amnesia and make us forget their squeaky-clean reputations. Drew Barrymore made everyone forget about that adorable little girl in E.T. with Poison Ivy, Anne Hathaway tried to do it post-Princess Diaries with Havoc, and Lindsay Lohan distanced herself from her Disney fame with the offensively bad I Know Who Killed Me.
Add Kristen Stewart to the list. In Welcome to the Rileys, Stewart attempts to shed the good-girl Bella Swan image by writhing around on a bar in hooker heels and little else and spewing profanities that would make even a sailor blush. Even though Stewart has become synonymous with sparkly vampires and PG-ratings, she’s never been one to shy away from adult material, from rape to extramarital affairs, and in Welcome to the Rileys, it’s no different.
Welcome to the Rileys tells the story of Doug and Lois Riley, a long-married couple from Indiana who have fallen into a pain-filled slump following the death of their teenage daughter. Doug (James Gandolfini) spends his time having an affair with a friendly waitress and chain-smoking alone in the garage, while Lois (Melissa Leo), paralyzed by guilt over her daughter’s death, has kept herself locked inside the house for years, too scared to even walk down the driveway to pick up the newspaper. They’re so stuck in their lifeless life that Lois even goes so far as having an engraved headstone for the couple placed next to their daughter’s, way ahead of schedule. They’ve simply given up trying.
So, of course, they need something to get them out of their slump, and thus enters Stewart. During a business convention down in New Orleans, Doug makes a pit stop at a strip club where he meets Mallory (Stewart), a teenage runaway, stripper, and sometime prostitute. Doug turns down her offer for a private lap dance, but makes an offer of his own: he will pay Mallory $100 a day if she will let him stay with her at her squalid home, promising that no funny business would happen. Perpetually low on cash, Mallory agrees and the two gradually settle into an unconventional father-daughter relationship in a way that only happens in the movies. Doug fixes Mallory’s plumbing, shows her how to make a proper bed, and fines her a dollar for every F-bomb she utters, which is a lot (it is amusing to see Tony Soprano shocked by the vulgar language coming out of Bella Swan’s mouth), and in return Doug gets a surrogate daughter of sorts to dote on.
Lois, upon hearing of Doug’s surprising decision to stay in New Orleans, decides she must fight to save their almost thirty-year marriage, so much of Leo’s screen time is spent trying to face her fears and go out into the world to drive down to New Orleans. And when she arrives, instead of being angry with Doug for up and leaving her to go live with a teenage hooker, as any rational person would, Lois takes up the mother role in this twisted little pseudo family.
Despite the complete incredulity of the situation, the indie drama, directed by Jake Scott (son of Ridley Scott), is pretty paint-by-numbers. From Doug and Mallory’s not-so meet cute, it’s evident that theirs will be a relationship of mutual healing, a symbiotic partnership giving each other exactly what they’ve been missing. Grieving Doug wants his little girl back, and runaway Mallory needs parental guidance. Convenient, ay? The predictability of the script, written by Ken Hixon, paired with its glacial pace, bogs down the film and renders it pretty forgettable, despite fine performances by Gandolfini and Leo.
As Doug, Gandolfini is surprisingly successful at shedding the Tony Soprano tag, despite his use of an unconvincing, strange hybrid of a Midwestern and Southern accent, and is graciously subtle in his grief rather than schmaltzy. Leo, outfitted in a Martha Stewart hairdo, pearls and cardigans, is particularly good at conveying Lois’s sense of constant constriction. One memorable scene has her venturing out at night to see the stars for the first time in years, and you can almost feel the sigh of relief, the weight of years spent hidden being lifted off her shoulders. The film is at its most interesting when Leo is at its focus.
That’s not to say that Stewart isn’t a talented or engaging actress— she was impressive in Into the Wild and Adventureland— but here she is almost trapped by her own Stewart-ness. Even when provocatively outfitted in a G-string and red X-shaped pasties, she’s in signature Stewart mode—the charcoaled eyes, that wild bird’s nest of brown hair atop her head that she constantly jerks her hands through, the twitching mouth that she’s forever chewing at. It’s as if she’s playing Kristen Stewart playing a stripper, never fully inhabiting the role. Yes, Stewart does jaded and angsty well (and frequently), but her portrayal is one-note compared to the more nuanced performances of Gandolfini and Leo.
Welcome to the Rileys, despite some good performances, will probably be forever known as the “K-Stew stripper movie,” and frankly, it’s little more than that: C+
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