A Guide to Recognizing your Saints
Dito Montiel steps behind the camera to shoot the film based on his memoir about growing up in New York. Dito essentially ran away from his home in a desperate attempt to save himself, but has returned fifteen years later upon hearing word of his father being severely ill. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints switches back and forth between following Dito and his friends getting in trouble in 1980s Queens and Dito seeing how everyone ended up in the present day. Leaving his old neighborhood seems to have saved Dito from either drug addiction or jail.
Shia LeBouf is one of those kids that you know is good and you wait around for them to do something to prove it. Well, here it is. He’s perfect as the young Dito stuck in a place that’s so dreadful the only thing he can do to save himself is to cut all ties and just leave it. Chazz Palminteri is spot on as Monty, Dito’s father, who is held back by his own weaknesses and unintentionally takes it out on his son. He favors Dito’s friend Antonio who is bigger and tougher than Dito and threatens to disown his son if he leaves. Really all the supporting work is good particularly Channing Tatum as Antonio.
I’m not going to lie to you. This is territory we’ve all been over before. The scene where Dito and Mike go to get their money from Frank is just like the scene in Boogie Nights, where Alfred Molina rocks out to Night Ranger. It’s not like they’ve never made a film about how hard it is to grow up in New York during an especially hot, sticky summer. Scorsese has pretty much cornered the market.
What this film does have is a solid story with a good cast and that pretty much trumps everything. Stories like this can be told over and over simply due to the fact that they are infinitely relatable. At the core of this film is the desire to get away in hopes that whatever you go to has to be better than where you are now. I think everyone has felt something similar to that at some point even if they aren’t willing to admit it yet. More than that, the direction is simple but with a few flourishes that really capture what living through moments like these are like. There are few things that miss the mark, but for a first effort it’s great work and I look forward to seeing Dito Montiel’s work in the future.
This is one of those films that most people probably never heard of, but should have. It’s not flashy, it doesn’t have a lot of big names and it isn’t about some cause somewhere else in the world. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is just a movie about what it’s like to grow up and then come home to see what happens when you leave it behind.
The Grade
- Story: B
- Acting: B+
- Visuals: B
- Originality: B-
- Enjoyability: B+
- Overall: B+
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