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October 27, 2006 > Arts & Entertainment > Compelling acting carries Recognizing Your Saints

Compelling acting carries Recognizing Your Saints

By Lauren Ames | For the Thresher

The first time he appears on screen, Dito Montiel (A Scanner Darkly’s Robert Downey, Jr.) is reading his newly published autobiography on a stage in California. The camera moves, submerging his face in darkness as a voiceover begins.

The voice prophesies which characters will die, which relationships will crumble and why that should not matter. A second later in Astoria, Queens a younger Dito (Constantine’s Shia Labeouf) tells us he plans to leave everyone and everything he knows behind. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is the semi-autobiography of the film’s director, the real Dito Montiel — how he came to live in California and desert both family and friends.

The book from which Robert Downey, Jr. is reading in the first scene is real, although the memoir bears no relation to the plot or characters of the film. They are instead amalgams of real people Dito met throughout his childhood, not perfect representations of his real friends. The film remains irritatingly aware of its literary inspiration. The audience watches Dito’s memories as he reads through flashed scripted lines on the screen, and the characters intermittently speak directly to the camera in order to remind us of who they are and how they feel.

The strength of the acting in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints outweighs this occasionally awkward device. The movie deservedly won the Best Ensemble acting award at Sundance. Antonio — played by Channing Tatum, an actress previously known for teen fluff movies like Step Up and She’s the Man — strikes a delicate balance between violence and vulnerability. The rest of the actors provide surpisingly engrossing performances despite their relative inexperience. Julia Garro and Martin Compston in particular draw attention for their portrayal of, respectively, the smart-mouthed Diane Honeyman and Mike O’Shea, a Scottish exchange student who becomes Dito’s best friend. Shia Labeouf drops his usual comedic persona with great success, playing the young Dito as a bored and desperate teenager. Every scene is believable and every confrontation is filled with credible emotion.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saint’s more experienced actors are relegated to less fulfilling roles — the film’s story does not really include them. The older Dito pops ineffectually in and out of his position as narrator to sigh at his past and argue with his ailing father, and the older Laurie (Rent’s Rosario Dawson) only appears during the last quarter to explain how Dito’s departure impacted the people he left behind. However, the scenes featuring Dito’s mother Flori (I Am Sam’s Dianne West) and Dito’s father Monty (A Bronx Tale’s Chazz Palminteri) carry some weight. When Flori confronts the older Dito about his ailing father she delivers her lines so effortlessly it is hard to believe that she read them from a script. Palminteri gives his best performance of the past few years as a man who desperately wants to be both his son’s best friend and protector.

The main problem with the film lies in the production. Montiel — a first-time director — chooses to show the younger Dito through the eyes of the elder, a technique that yields both negative and positive results. The negative includes conflicting storylines. Although the film begins and ends with Dito going to New York to visit his dying father, the bulk of the plot frustratingly focuses on the reasons for his departure. However, by portraying Dito’s past as a function of his memory, Montiel preserves the daydream-like quality of the summer in which the film takes place. Twenty-year-old pop music softens the film’s most violent scenes and youthful romances act as a visual deja vu.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is a hard film to watch. Montiel gives his audience Queens as he remembers it — a home, but one violent enough to cause him to turn his back on everyone he knew. The film’s compelling visuals will remain with the moviegoer long after leaving the theater.

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