Somewhere in Queens
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes
Stars: Ray Romano, Laurie Metcalf
Writer/Director: Ray Romano
Ray Romano has spent his career examining the Life of the Lovable Schlub, and there’s a sense that Somewhere in Queens — a film he wrote, directed, and stars in — may be his master’s thesis on the subject.
From his formative standup routines to his long-running sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, Romano has always struck that perilous balance between observation and condescension. His characters, and those around them, usually dabble in crass Noo Yawk stereotypes, loudly commenting on the world as seen through a filter that is at once cosmopolitan and provincial.
Here he plays Leo Russo, a good-natured but somewhat dim-witted husband and dad whose life has been spent in the service of his father (Tony Lo Bianco), owner of the family construction business. If Leo ever had any kind of ambition, it has long since been squashed by his father and younger brother (Sebastian Maniscalco), who treat him like a moron and act like his bloodline is the only reason he still has a job.
But Leo has a refuge from that world: A wife and son for whom he would do absolutely anything. Angela (Laurie Metcalf) has recently emerged from the dark night of a cancer scare, a chapter that has left her emotionally scarred yet stubbornly unwilling to seek solace with a survivor’s group.
What’s more, they are both enormously proud — if somewhat mystified — by the high school basketball success of their otherwise painfully shy and reclusive son, whose real name is Matthew but who everyone calls “Sticks” because of his long, athletic legs.
Like every other man in the Russo clan, Sticks seems destined to live his life bent over sawhorses cutting 2-by-4s down to size. In fact, when a college basketball talent scout holds out the possibility of a scholarship to Drexel University (in Philadelphia!) The Russos stare at him uncomprehendingly, as if he’s offering them tickets on NASA’s next Artemis moon flight.
The following Sunday, there’s a spirited extended family dinner debate about Sticks and college. Why should he waste four years, Leo’s father barks, when eventually he’d just end up buckling on a tool belt, anyway?
But Leo is insistent: Sticks will compete for the scholarship. There’s just one problem: The team try-outs are in two weeks, and Sticks’s mercurial girlfriend, Dani (Sadie Stanley), has just broken up with him. Already in a perpetually fragile emotional state, Sticks is virtually paralyzed by the development.
Desperate to see Sticks go on to basketball glory, Leo hatches a plan. And by that, I mean he hatches the worst kind of plan you can possibly imagine.
By now, you can probably sense that the stakes in Somewhere in Queens are, by movie standards, rather small potatoes. There’s not a life-or-death dilemma in sight, and it’s clear that the Russos comprise such a tight-knit — if loudly dysfunctional — family unit that no one here is ever going to fall by the wayside.
It would be enough to simply spend this hour-and-three-quarters in the company of Romano and Metcalf (Roseanne), who, with 28 Emmy nominations between them, have mastered the craft of efficiently — and hilariously — defining endearing characters (Metcalf gets to deliver one of the funniest last lines you’ll ever hear).
But writer/director Romano is not in sitcom mode here. He patiently draws us into this family’s orbit. Instinctively, Romano seems to understand that people most often show their true selves when breaking bread together. And so he sits us at their tables — many tables, from the Russos’ laden dining room table to a series of gaudy banquet tables to a wobbly café table overlooking a shopping mall atrium.
One by one, around those tables the Russos and others drop their defensive masks, offering grudging glimpses of not only the personal pains of loneliness, rejection, and old age, but also the blessings of pride, hope, and unqualified admiration. Even Leo, rising for once above the lovable lug role in which his family has cast him, discovers in his disastrously fumbling attempts to protect his son that no matter how badly things turn out, forgiveness can be forthcoming so long as your heart was truly in the right place.
Organically, it dawns on us this is not simply a feel-good comedy about one quirky family’s reaction to some ripples in their accustomed dynamic. As he so slyly did during his decade on Raymond, Romano draws for us a scrawled, jumbled blueprint of the entire family construct: the messy, incoherent, haphazard aggregate that somehow manages to pull itself together and build its own, immutably flawed, monument.
Become a Saturday Evening Post member and enjoy unlimited access. Subscribe now
