Welcome To The Rileys is a drama about a couple who lost their daughter 8 years ago.  Since then they’ve been barely living and Lois (Melissa Leo), the wife hasn’t even left the house.  Their life changes when Doug (James Gandolfini) goes to New Orleans for a business conference.  It’s there he runs into a prostitute named “Mallory” (Kristen Stewart) who reminds him of his daughter.  He stops everything to start taking care of this girl.  Soon bonds are being formed and old wounds mended.

I’ve wanted to see this movie for a long time.  Since it first got rave reviews last year at Sundance.  But it unfortunately never really got any kind of real US release so I didn’t get a chance to check it out until recently.

Kristen Stewart & Melissa Leo share a scene.

For the most part the film is kind of your average indie drama.  I often complain about this on this site.  There are so many movies and they’re all very similar and it just gets boring.  These are the types of films Sundance tends to eat up though.  But this one has 3 things going for it.  It’s 3 leads.  Melissa Leo, James Gandolfini & Kristen Stewart all put in out of this world performances.  Gandolfini even affects a strange accent that could have been annoying but for some reason works.  I didn’t even recognize Leo in her first couple of scenes because I’m so used to her not being so fragile.  And Kristen Stewart continues to take roles to try and make people forget she was in Twilight.  Here playing a prostitute she gets to wear next to nothing, and talk about all kinds of sex acts and say “fuck” a bunch (she also shows off her ass a couple of times).  But there’s a nice subtlety to her performance as well where she betrays the teenager that lies below this crude girl.

Besides the performances there’s the wonderful scenery of Louisiana that always helps to make a movie a little prettier and some decent, but not great, cinematography.

The movie is filled with flaws though.  It seems like somewhere a scene was deleted where they disclosed important information because suddenly Doug knows a bunch of information about “Mallory” that he never knew previously and it would have been a nice scene to see her opening up to him that much to reveal that information.  Also there’s a sort of big deal made that Doug and Lois should talk about their daughter’s death, and then it isn’t brought up again with the talk never occurring.  Their relationship is just magically healed.  There’s a bunch of other moments that just seem like they are missing.  And the ending is just sort of anti-climactic.

But overall the very strong performances are reason enough to recommend this movie.

It comes out on dvd & Blu-ray February 1st and is available to order now: