John Turturro and his brothers go into business building houses. Turturro wants to build them properly, and drives his family nuts while he builds his first development rigt next to a dairy farm, which makes it seem impossible to sell the beautiful homes he builds.

It's a beautiful character study, based on a play that Turturro and Brandon Cole wrote while they were students; the role is said to have been modeled on Turturrro's father, who seems to have been a man who took pride in doing things right. Turturro accurately portrays him, passionate, hard-working, and occasionally ridiculous and even destructive. It's agreat performance with a fine cast.

Boy, this is bad. It's as if Turturro, playing method as Barton Fink, had rapped out his own screenplay about "the common man" and somehow saw it get before the cameras. The opening few minutes are fine, but then goes downhill and doesn't recover. There's a vaguely sickening feel that Turturro feels this is some sort of Important Statement, as if he believed the fictional studio's hype and cast himself as an auteur, ready to deliver that Barton Fink feeling. An overlong, self-important mess.

I think there's a tendency for actors who decide to direct their own movies to leave absolutely everything up to their colleagues, the actors, including driving the story. I couldn't tell if this film was scripted or improvised, but there's an awful lot of long, no-dialogue shots of faces and activity that don't advance the plot, what there is of it. A surprising amount of what dialogue there is, is in untranslated Italian-which didn't bother me, except for the fact that-again-it didn't advance the story much. After about half an hour of establishing 4 or 5 characters without much action or tension, I still couldn't tell where the film was going. It seems to be about holding one's work to high standards, but then what? No dramatic tension, no imbalance to resolve, no conflicts to keep track of. Two stars for good acting and competent staging; two stars for lousy script, absent directing, and nonexistent editing. I can't be accused of spoiling anything if I merely point out that this film left me plenty of time between dialogue and story elements to ask myself about the plot, the story, the acting, the characters...it didn't draw me in at all.