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Trailer for "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints"

The story behind writer-director Dito Montiel’s debut feature, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, gives off a few vibes of a less awesome variation on young Orson Welles’ triumphalist arrival at RKO sixty-six years ago. The not-quite-so-young Montiel prepped for his inaugural opportunity as a downtown (Manhattan) bar bouncer and music-scene habitue, and later, by writing the semi-autobiographical “memoir” of the same title about his formative years in the Borough of Queens’ Astoria section.

From there, he obtained assistance from the Sundance Institute in adapting Saints to the screen. It went on to win the director’s prize and the Special Jury award at this year’s Sundance Festival, and his film has been receiving some critical approval—most notably from Manohla Dargis of the New York Times.

Any vague resemblance to Welles’, or anybody else’s, dynamite debut is dissipated by the actual work. Saints is a ragged and overwrought film. Its pumped-up energy and angry emotion haven’t been put in the service of a coherent narrative or any discernible personal or social insights. The movie is dominated by big, unearned attitude.

Montiel has secured the participation of two fine actors to portray the character based on himself. Robert Downey, Jr. is the 30-something author returning to Queens, after an absence of 15 years, at his mother’s worried request, to visit his ailing, estranged father. Shia LaBeouf is Dito as a high school student whose aimless adventures and angst take up the bulk of the film. Young Dito hangs with a few of his buddies, whose scrapes and entertainments, on and off the streets, are dominated by the volatile, belligerent Antonio (Channing Tatum, a sort of muscular young Matt Dillon).

Dito spends his down time chafing at the geographical and cultural restraints of his life in the hood, and dreaming of escaping to California with his new school friend Mike (Martin Compston), an Irish immigrant who speaks with a lilt but insists he’s from Scotland. A portrait of the artist yearning to break out and breathe free—except there’s little indication here that Dito has any larger vision, artistic or otherwise.

None of the characters has any persuasive concrete identity. Dito’s father (Chazz Palminteri) is an assertively talkative, ineffectual man who seems to spend most of his time at the kitchen table working on old typewriters. (The script specifies little about his history or pursuits.) His mother (Dianne Wiest, largely wasted) fusses and putters around their apartment.

Montiel doesn’t seem able to imagine or reimagine lifelike people, and he shows little skill at shaping scenes or telling a story. There is almost no story line in Saints. It’s mostly loosely related incidents and vignettes that don’t develop much narrative thrust. This approach might work in other hands, but for a film that’s evidently supposed to convey a sense of nostalgic regret and biographical inspiration, Saints is emotionally empty and posturing.

It’s framed by scenes of the older Dito’s return home (after an unconvincingly long absence) that are strangely lacking in persuasive texture or detail. Most of Saints’ energy is produced by mere gimmicky technique. Montiel produces a tense, tricked-up kineticism, using a jumpy (and too-often ill-postioned) camera and punchy editing. He often employs dialogue that’s contentiously overlapping, which might be interesting if these scenes built to any involving drama or contained more information. These people’s reasons and goals remain obscure.

At the end, Montiel abandons the throbbing, brooding tone for stilted emotion and sententious conversation. Whatever the material that he worked into this noisy, ill-proportioned movie meant to him, he hasn’t come close to communicating it.