Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Sat Apr 15, 2006 12:34 am 
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Privileged fiasco


Turturro's Romance and Cigarettes leaves almost no impression -- unless you're bowled over by James Gandolfini singing (he hasn't much of a voice). Nick Murder (pointless surname) works as a garbage man in Queens (an occupation fleetingly referenced) and fixes bridges with Steve Buscemi, who gives him advice in dialogue that's not very well written or delivered. Nick's married to Kitty (Susan Sarandon) and has three daughters -- Mary Louise Parker, Mandy Moore, and Aida Turturro (deceased from The Sopranos, John's cousin; Turturro works himself and his little boy into the movie too at some point). What's this lively cast doing in such a fiasco? Well, Turturro has been in some good movies -- notably Do the Right Thing, Barton Fink, and The Big Lebowski -- and he has lots of friends. The Coen brothers, whom he's worked with so notably, produced.

You might call this a partial, second-hand, working-class musical. It's second-hand in the sense that none of the music is original. And it's partial because not all the principal characters sing or appear in musical numbers. Buscemi, Eddie Izzard (as a minister), Mary Louise Parker don't get them. Numbers are dubs or voice-overs of songs from James Brown, Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdink, Westside Story, Saturday Night Fever, and many other sources, which evoke John Waters (especially now that he's gone musical with Hairspray) when they're performed in the down-and-dirty settings of a shabby Queens suburb. Sometimes this achieves poetry; other times, more often, it just seems odd, and Turturro hasn't Water's gift for sleaze, which might have transformed this story into high camp. It runs more to crudity, to a degree admittedly unusual for a (partial) musical, chiefly through the mistress, Tula (Kate Winslet), a gutter-mouthed shop girl from Lancashire who thinks -- and talks, in vivid detail -- of little but sex. Tula's lively, zoftig, and in her crude way a hot number. But she's awfully shallow.

There's audacity in the conception. Gandalfini singing would startle even Dr. Melfi. Certainly this is a good cast. But it's not necessarily the right cast. Gandalfini fits -- were it not for his overwhelming current association with that mansion in Jersey and with Edie Falco, who seems a more likely match for him than Sarandon. She has done working class roles (White Palace, Thelma and Louise); but she's fifteen years older than Gandalfini, and seems too classy for this setting. Izzard's out of place in leading a mixed-race Queens gospel choir. Kate Winslet's sublimely into her role, but her character is a little too tacky for the conventional musical love interest she is, by default, made to become.

There's not much of a story (one longs for John Water's ornate plot structures) and Turturro's editing is patchy -- he has a bad habit of snipping in two or three other scenes during a song to no purpose. In fact none of this would make it within two hundred miles of Broadway, though as The Mother (who appears when Nick's in hospital from OD'ing on licorice) Elaine Stritch gives her five-minute cameo a Broadway intensity and snap. Along with the vagueness in the action, the period is also undetermined, a "general retro feel," as Variety puts it -- very general, not very retro -and so not surprisingly, as is probably already obvious, the tone is also uneven.

Eventually Nick decides to give up Tula, and Kitty (Sarandon), somewhat reluctantly, takes him back. Sarandon injects some genuine feeling -- no doubt from another, more serious, movie -- into those final scenes. Winslet is a buoyant scene-stealer throughout in her (unfortunately) smaller role, and when Nick pushes her in the river in his goodbye scene with her she has an underwater singing sequence that is the movie's best moment visually -- it's gloriously improbable and quite beautiful. There's more. Bobby Carnavale is an absurd peacock as Mandy Moore's neighbor fiancé: his looks and strutting are eye-catching, but he'd need either to be less obtrusive or have more lines for the character to work in the whole thing. But -- What "whole thing" are we talking about? This effort just doesn't hold together. You keep wondering how individual scenes might have worked well somewhere else, in some other movie, where the style and tone were consistent.

Romance and Cigarettes is a privileged US indie movie, the kind that it took pull to get made and that, because of the pull, and the stars brought in as a result, gets good festival mileage and Sundance buzz, but fizzles out in the real world.

P.s.: This is Turturro's third feature as a director. Does anybody besides his mother and the respective casts and crews remember the first two?

SHOWTIMES
Sat, Apr 29 / 8:00 / Kabuki / ROMA29K

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