In his pajamas and bathrobe an old man named Don wanders around Little Italy
on Sunday morning. He threatens an old woman on a park bench, plots to muscle
in on a neighborhood business and talks about one old score he has to settle.
A caretaker keeps him out of trouble and humors him. Or is it his son? And who
is humoring whom? His “son” says the Feds are about to indict him
for imaginary crimes he didn’t commit. Are they playing a game or is he
trying to scare the old man?
At dinner his wife and son argue about Don’s health.
His wife thinks he has lost his mind, but his son seems to know he is acting
a part for the Feds who have wired his home and his phone, in spite of seven
previous acquittals on grounds of insanity. At odd moments Don leaves the table
and seems to wander out into the streets where he talks with his brother Benny
who repeatedly dies a bloody death at his feet. He is suspicious the old woman
in the park, who may be his mother, is talking to the police about him.
Somehow Don has come up with $50,000 in cash which he wants his son to use to
buy out a neighborhood restaurant. Did he wander into a bank and withdraw his
life savings? Or did he get the money from his dead brother as he claims?
His wife and son force him to take his medications, but, as he explains to his
dead brother Benny, some of his meds are very entertaining. He confides to Benny
that the whole thing is an act, except for one thing: he can’t tell when
he is acting anymore and when he is real. It’s like a Hollywood thing,
getting so far into the part you can’t get out.
Don visits the gravesite of his mistress Tina, where he exposes some very tender
feelings and memories; but it turns out he is not at the gravesite, he is sitting
on the park bench in the middle of winter in his pajamas.
It turns out Don is about to be indicted by the Feds and he is scared of going
to jail, to “protective solitary confinement.” He will do anything
to avoid that. His wife is terrified that a public trial will destroy him once
and for all. Don warns the old woman that he will get rid of her if she talks
to the police. But she is not afraid because God will not allow her to die.
This is her punishment for her sins.
Don gets dressed to pay a visit to the neighborhood restaurant and “close
the deal.” When he arrives there, the scene flashes back to Don’s
affair with Tina, and we discover that she may have had a thing going on with
his brother Ben.
Flash forward and Don has arrived at the bar to buy out the owner. When the
owner resists, tempers flair. Don pulls out a shotgun and kills him. He wanders
out into the street where he talks to his dead mistress Tina and his dead brother,
Ben. Finally he confronts his mother and puts his shotgun to her head saying
she must die for talking to the police. But he’s not really sure she’s
there. And she’s not saying.
In prison Don unravels. He thinks he can plead insanity and get off like he
has in the past. But this time it’s different. The Feds have a witness,
Don's son, who has been engineering his fall all along. The judge locks him
away in a mental institution, where he is left with his memories. As Ben and
Tina make love in Don’s hospital cell, Don shoots them both as he did
so many years ago in the heat of a jealous rage.
Locked away to relive his crimes in a warped mental captivity filled with anger
and regret and laced with heavy medication, Don is now in his own private Hell.