A Guide to Recognizing Household Saints and Director Nancy Savoca

By Andy Crump  |  January 10, 2024 | 12:45pm
Movies Features nancy savoca
A Guide to Recognizing Household Saints and Director Nancy Savoca

People see Jesus Christ in whatever suits their need for their faith’s validation: Water-stained plaster; toast; the lid of a Marmite jar; a Walmart receipt. In Nancy Savoca’s Household Saints, he makes a personal appearance in one character’s living room as they iron the laundry. It’s the film’s only overt instance of holy visitation, but it’s enough to invite us to reconsider little details, like a perfect pinochle hand, as proof of the divine. Savoca filters these moments through the idiosyncratic tale of one Italian American couple’s union, and their daughter’s lifelong striving for sainthood. Becoming a bride of Christ isn’t easy. Watching your child try isn’t, either, but at least her efforts pay off by blessing the family business, a butcher shop, with heavenly sausages.

In accordance with the family’s background, their story isn’t just their story. It’s their friends’ and neighbors’ story, too, in the sense that they’ll regale anyone who will listen to them, applying little tweaks and edits in the telling. Household Saints is about the way stories change in each narration, rooted in the mores of Italian American life: hotheaded conflicts over nothing, heaving sexual advances, and religious superstitions held by the people who remember the old country, and rejected by the ones who never knew it. The film is a document of culture shift, where the younger generation cuts ties with the incumbents’ customs to sculpt their own; as such, it’s a film about cycles, bookended by a prologue and epilogue set decades after its events.

Given a limited release in 1993, Household Saints is back in theaters now in a shiny new 4K restoration from Philadelphia’s Lightbox Film Center at University of the Arts, released by Kino Lorber and Milestone Films. 2024 is as good a moment as any for a production lost in the shuffle of the 1990s’ upsurge of indie cinema. Remember Fine Line Features, the indie-flavored arm of New Line Cinema? You may not; New Line and fellow Time Warner subsidiary HBO Films merged into Picturehouse in 2005, and Fine Line got swallowed up in the process, then swallowed again by Warner Home Video when New Line shuttered five years later. 

Fine Line movies like The Player, Hoop Dreams and My Own Private Idaho survived the crush and grind of these moving parts, by virtue of their membership in contemporary cinema canons. Household Saints had no such fortune, so it’s a relief to see a film buried in the past freshened up for the present. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a lovely slice-of-life picture, stacked with performances beaming low-key urgency. For Savoca and Richard Guay, her co-writer and husband of 44 years, the experience of seeing Household Saints today, bright, vital and warm anew, has been somewhat more meaningful than that. 

“In some ways, for me, it almost feels like a new movie,” says Guay, who, along with Nancy, spoke to Paste by Zoom. “30 years ago, we had a very good release at the time. But the level of interest is really quite something.” He pauses to search for the right word to put to the feeling; Savoca jumps in to finish his sentence, proof of their seasoned relationship and partnership. “We’re really surprised, honestly.”

“I love hearing from somebody seeing it for the first time,” Savoca adds. “What’s that like?” She and Guay are naturally close to Household Saints, a product of its era of filmmaking. Like many restorations, the movie functions a bit like a time capsule when contextualized in the present, though the period setting gives it a quality Savoca describes as “a room full of mirrors.” Household Saints is a film from the past, about the past; it doesn’t reflect the 1990s in terms of its content, but in its aesthetic. “I think it is evocative of a kind of movie that got made when there were a lot more risk takers,” Guay points out. “I don’t know if this movie would get made today,  but in the [1990s], there were a lot of these kinds of really interesting, really different, sort of movies being made.”

Guay notes that plenty of interesting movies are being made today, too, but the point stands that the 1990s, theatrically and in the home video market, were a friendlier time for independent movies like Household Saints, something that Jesse Pires, Director & Curator of Lightbox Film Center, cites as a systemic factor. “The 1990s indie film boom brought so many more voices and perspectives to the fore,” Pires explains. “Stories that might not have made it to the big screen before were now finding audiences, and there was an infrastructure there to get it out to people.” As the century turned, so did the attention of viewers and the industry, as the 2000s ushered in a golden age of television with shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. 

The new environment was inhospitable for Household Saints, and Savoca’s work fell into unjust obscurity. Consequently, Pires considers the film “forgotten,” and not so much “lost” like other recent restorations. (See: Tokyo Pop.) “The more time that passes, the more important it is to return to some of these ‘forgotten’ works and see them for the modern day classics that they are,” Pires says.

For Household Saints, preservation means confronting the established order, according to Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, Milestone’s co-founders. (In a nice reflection of the film’s pattern motif, they, like Savoca and Guay, are also married.) “We’re challenging the canon,” Heller says. “We’re calling attention to films and filmmakers that have been overlooked, to genres, to filmmaking communities, to lots of things that have been overlooked.” 

Maybe putting Household Saints back into the wild is a small step, but it’s nonetheless a step toward diversifying cinema’s landscape. Companies like Milestone are positioned nicely for achieving that goal. “We can actually prioritize what we think is important,” Heller says. “So we do films by women, and queer people, and people of color. We get to do films that we want to do.” 

Household Saints, Doros observes, contrasts slightly with that categorical approach. “It has a cast of names,” he says. “People recognize those names.” Those names went on to greater success because, says Heller, “they’re so good!” She and Doros are right all around: Vincent D’Onofrio, Tracey Ullman, Lili Taylor, and Michaels Imperioli and Rispoli make up the core cast, with support from Judith Malina and Victor Argo. 

D’Onofrio plays Joseph Santangelo, a butcher. Ullman plays Catherine Falconetti, daughter of Lino (Argo), one of Joseph’s pinochle pals. At the peak of an oppressive heat wave smothering New York City’s Little Italy, Joseph draws an unbeatable hand with Catherine’s hand on the line; the pair wed, and over time and through tragedy — the still-birth of Catherine’s first baby, in the film’s most harrowing, heartbreaking scene — they have Teresa, played by Rachael Bella as a child and Taylor as a young woman. Rispoli plays Catherine’s lovesick veteran brother Nicky; Imperioli plays Teresa’s nervous future gentleman caller, Leonard. It’s a rich ensemble that, on its surface, looks unlike the sort of film Doros and Heller refer to — except for Savoca’s guidance from behind the camera. 

It’s nothing to sneeze at to distribute a film starring baby-faced D’Onofrio, Ullman, Taylor, and Imperioli, but they aren’t what compelled them to pick up Household Saints. “Rich and Nancy were the draw for us,” Heller says. She and Doros met the couple at a DGA panel back in 2021 about lost or neglected pictures, an event that led to the foundation of the film preservation organization Missing Movies; they hit it off, and their immediate fellowship opened an opportunity for Household Saints’ redistribution. Savoca and Guay were already trying to make that happen, but after being stonewalled by a non-responsive company, they decided to reach out to Doros and Heller.

“I don’t even know if we’d seen Household Saints yet, or if maybe we saw shortly thereafter,” Heller recalls. “But we said, ‘You guys are great. We think you’re wonderful, we know you’re real filmmakers, and we’d love to start the process.’” Doros is firm that Savoca hasn’t been given her due. Acquiring Household Saints is a second chance to earn for her the recognition she deserves – not unlike Teresa’s journey to her own canonization, but without the miracle sausage, holy bliss, or spiritual doubts. (Fine: it’s not like Teresa’s journey at all.) For her part, Savoca is just delighted to find new admirers in the midst of our current restoration boom. “I’m happy to know that I’m part of a tribe of people that really enjoys seeing something different,” she says. “When other people see Household Saints – and not just Household Saints, but any film that is out of the box — and shows enthusiasm for it, I just think, ‘I’m part of the audience.’” 

Guay finds that thought validating. Showing Household Saints in repertory and arthouse theaters, rather than on digital services that wouldn’t bother promoting it, is a win. “We’re from the era where that was the point, was the theatrical,” Guay says. “The point was to get a group of people who don’t know each other to watch this thing and give it their undivided attention for an hour and a half or two hours.” 

Glancing at 2023 in the rearview, there are signs that theatrical moviegoing is moving toward a healthier place; people flocked to tentpoles other than superhero movies, and more importantly, low-to-mid-budget adult dramas enjoyed a minor resurgence; The Iron Claw, The Boys in the Boat and You Hurt My Feelings, for example, all seem to fill that essential role in the production and moviegoing habitats. People want to see good, original movies again. 

But for Savoca, seeing Household Saints’ gorgeous remaster is a success unto itself. Theatrical runs in New York City, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, Austin and more cities still, are a measure of success beyond expectation. “I really didn’t even think it was going to go beyond New York, honestly,” Savoca says. “It’s regional. It’s here.” The reaction at Household Saints’ New York Film Festival debut was an eye-opener for her. Removed from the context of both the year it was made and the years that pass in the narrative, people still embraced it. “I think this movie is one of those where you bring to it what you bring to it, and then it has its effect,” Savoca says. “It’s a dialogue with whatever you’re bringing to it.” 

One might relate the miscarriage scene to recently passed anti-abortion laws so draconian and loosely written that women in Catherine’s situation could potentially face prosecution; or, like Doros, one might appreciate Teresa’s beliefs as personal matters, or “uncorrupted” in his words, in contrast to faith’s weaponization as a “a political motivation and tool.” Teresa isn’t hurting anyone. She doesn’t impose her devotion to Christ on anyone else. Hers is a gentle form of worship, even if all of us heathens might see the way she acts on that worship as self-destructive. The text hasn’t changed since 1993, other than looking prettier; what it means to folks seeing it today has — and that’s all Savoca hopes for. “Everything else is like gravy,” she laughs.

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.

 
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