In Welcome to the Rileys, James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo play a married couple whose daughter has died in a car accident. Leo’s character, Lois Riley, has turned into a pill-popping agoraphobic. Gandolfini’s character, Doug, goes on a business trip to New Orleans, where he meets Mallory, a 17-year old runaway working as a stripper who looks a lot like his dead daughter and is played by Kristen Stewart, in another part that requires limited to no smiling. Doug proceeds to try to take care of her — scrub her sink, make sure she doesn’t sleep all day. Mallory gets over her agoraphobia to come down to New Orleans and mother the girl herself. After some bumps in the road (“I’m nobody’s little girl!†Stewart screams in messy eye, giving herself a new catchphrase), one assumes Mallory is, in fact, welcomed in to the Rileys. This is a whole lot of Sundance cliché for one movie — mourning parents, strippers with hearts of gold, new non-biological families — but Leo and Gandolfini are usually so good, we’ll reserve total judgment.
