From Ivana Redwine,
Your Guide to DVD.
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Rough Edges, but Passionate and Personal

A prizewinner at Sundance, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006) features a talented cast that includes veterans Dianne Wiest, Robert Downey Jr., Chazz Palminteri and Rosario Dawson, as well as up-and-coming youngsters Shia LaBeouf, Melonie Diaz and Channing Tatum. The film marks an impressive directorial debut by Dito Montiel, who also wrote the screenplay. The movie was inspired by Montiel's 2003 book of the same title.

Saints is an ambitious film of raw emotional power. It's set in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens and has an extraordinary sense of place. It captures some of the freneticism and confusion of youth, yet there are quiet scenes where adults talk wistfully. At times it feels spontaneous, while at other times it's deliberately artificial.

There are awkward jump cuts, occasionally actors address the camera directly and at one point a small portion of the script is displayed in text on the screen. It requires a suspension of disbelief to accept that Shia LaBeouf grows up to be Robert Downey Jr. and Melonie Diaz grows up to be Rosario Dawson, but it's worth the effort. Watching Saints is like listening to music where there are false notes here and there, yet we are deeply moved because the overall performance is heartfelt.

Breaking Away, Making Peace With the Past

Early on in Saints, young actor Shia LaBeouf faces the camera and declares, "My name's Dito. I'm gonna leave everybody in this film." Later, as the movie winds down, Robert Downey Jr. intones in voice-over, "I left everything and everyone, but no one — no one — has ever left me."

Writer-director Dito Montiel, who grew up in Astoria, Queens, has created a semiautobiographical movie, naming his protagonist after himself. He cast Shia LaBeouf to play the teenage Dito and Robert Downey Jr. to play the adult Dito. The story consists of the episodes leading up to young Dito's abrupt departure from Astoria in 1986 and what happens when the grownup Dito returns there in 2005 after a 19-year absence.

Montiel doesn't bother with graceful transitions — he simply jumps from scene to scene, sometimes with a sudden drastic change in tone. However, he does demonstrate a flair for creating scenes that stick in the mind. For example, there's the chaotic scene where Dito's father (Chazz Palminteri) suffers an epileptic seizure. But Montiel also is willing to let good actors deliver memorable speeches, such as the heartbreaking one Dito's mother (Dianne Wiest) gives to her son: "We were too old to have such a young boy. We needed you probably more than you needed us."

A So-So Making-Of Featurette

The A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints DVD contains a run-of-the-mill 20-minute making-of featurette that gives us a chance to see writer-director Dito Montiel. Also, we learn that Robert Downey Jr. was a driving force in getting the film made. Downey describes Montiel's memoir, which inspired the movie, as "a series of disjointed, brilliant vignettes."

The featurette spends a lot of its time on the cast, and there's a little about cinematographer Eric Gautier, best known for The Motorcycle Diaries. There are interviews with some cast members, including Shia LaBeouf, who says about the film's writer-director, "Dito is the most cocky cat in the world."

And we get to meet the real-life Nerf, who grew up to become a teacher.

An Informative Audio Commentary

A feature-length audio commentary by writer-director Dito Montiel with a little help from editor Jake Pushinsky is provided on the DVD. The commentary is too self-congratulatory, but Montiel does have quite a few interesting things to say. The movie was shot in his old neighborhood, including the church where he went to grade school, the public swimming pool he used to sneak into as a kid and the house he was brought up in.

Montiel obviously got some of his ideas about how to direct from listening to DVD commentaries, although he understandably can't necessarily remember which ones. He claims that prior to the reviews of Saints, he "never even heard the word 'impressionistic' before." He says he hates Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street," but he used the song at one point in the film because it evoked the feeling he wanted.

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