by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a much-hyped Lifetime movie called Victoria
Gotti: My Father’s Daughter. Victoria Gotti
was one of four children of Mafia boss John Gotti, who ultimately ascended to
domination of all five of the major Mafia crime families and became known as
the “Teflon Don” because he escaped conviction for any of his crimes from 1977,
when he was released from prison, until 1990, when he was finally convicted on 13
counts, most notably the murder of his immediate predecessor as capo
di tutti capi (“Boss of All Bosses”).
Victoria Gotti was intimately involved in the project and is even listed as
playing herself — which she does only in interstital narration sequences; for
the main part of the movie she’s played by actress Chelsea Frei, who does a
good job matching her performance to Ms. Gotti’s own narration. Victoria’s
first recollection of her dad (Maurice Benard, Victoria Gotti’s personal choice
to play him) is as a prisoner, though her mom tells her that her dad is a
building contractor (which likely has some elements of truth in it: virtually
all the major contractors in New York, as well as almost all the unions that
supposedly “represent” their workers, are Mafia-controlled, which is likely how
Donald Trump first got involved with organized crime: you don’t build things in
New York City without interacting with the Mob and giving them their “cut”) and
doesn’t quite make it clear why they can visit her dad but he can’t leave where
he is to see them.
The young Victoria gets quite angry when one of her
schoolmates accuses her dad of being a gangster, and she’s so defensive about
it that when a young man named Carmine Agnello (a young man named Elijah Silva,
whom director Catherine Cyran introduced with a luscious shot of him reclining
against the hood of a car, clad in blue jeans and flashing a mightily
impressive basket at the camera: I immediately went into lust at first sight
just looking at him!) cruises her, she ignores the abundant evidence that he has Mob connections until it’s too late. Victoria
defies her dad’s warning that she’s not to see Carmine, and they carry on a
clandestine courtship behind the Don’s back until Carmine boldly walks into the
back room at Gotti’s “club” headquarters and confronts him directly — whereupon
John Gotti becomes convinced that Carmine’s cojones (or whatever the equivalent is in Italian) prove
he’s a fitting husband for his little girl after all. We also see John Gotti
goes into a murderous rage when his son Frankie is accidentally run down and
killed by their neighbor — Gotti takes a baseball bat and smashes the window of
the poor man’s car. What we don’t
see is any of Gotti’s actual criminal life: films like Francis Ford Coppola’s The
Godfather (from which director Cyran and
her cinematographer, unlisted on imdb.com, copy the overall “past is brown”
look that has become de rigueur
for “serious” movies in general and gangster movies in particular!) and Martin
Scorsese’s GoodFellas kept an
effective balance between portraying the Mafiosi as ruthless killers and criminal businesspeople and
showing them at home with their families having the same normal relationship
problems as anyone else. Cyran and her writer, David Schneiderman (adapting
Victoria Gotti’s own memoir of her dad), couldn’t be bothered: we hear Victoria Gotti describe in her narration scenes we
should be shown, and the movie
John Gotti is never shown killing anyone or directly involved in a criminal
enterprise — we’re just told he
did those things.
As a result, we don’t get much of a sense of John Gotti the
murderer and thug — just John Gotti the butch but still loving dad — and
there’s a bit of a sense of tragedy when he dies of throat and neck cancer in a
prison hospital while Victoria’s marriage to Carmine explodes under his
compulsive gambling (they honeymoon in Las Vegas — well, where else do you expect a Mafia couple to go? — only Carmine
loses the entire $30,000 nest egg John contributed to them in one night at a casino)
and his bipolar illness (which given what I’m dealing with on my job these days
hit a bit too close to home). At one point Carmine threatens Victoria with a
shotgun while she’s trying to take a bath to relieve the stress of being with
him and get up the courage to leave, though eventually the decision is made for
her by federal law enforcement, who finally bust Carmine’s “steel-shredding”
business as a Mob front. Bereft of any support from her dad or her husband since they’re both in jail, Victoria knuckles
down to her career as a writer and columnist for a New Jersey local paper,
makes enough of a living from her writings (including three novels as well as
the memoir we’ve just seen adapted into a film) not only to support herself but
raise her three kids as well. Victoria Gotti: Her Father’s Daughter diplomatically avoids the reports that Victoria’s
brother, John Gotti, Jr., took over their dad’s Mob enterprises when dad was
imprisoned and subsequently died. It’s ultimately an unsatisfying movie because
one senses the story had more potential than the one that got told, and also
because Cyran and Schneiderman can’t get us to believe that as otherwise
intelligent a woman as Victoria Gotti could have been so naïve for so long
about both her father’s and her husband’s criminal connections. A story that in
Coppola’s or Scorsese’s hands could have been scorching drama here simmers to a
low flame — though Cyran’s direction is at least technically assured and this
film is one more exhibit in the case that Hollywood has woefully discriminated
against women directors and should be giving them more of a chance on
theatrical features.
