BlissAndConversation.com

Reviewing Your Life On Stage and Screen

How often do we go to a theatre to escape the problems and mundanities of everyday life?  How often do we come out of the theatre talking about what we saw, what it meant and, specifically, what it meant to us and how it made us feel about ourselves in the world as we see it?  This series is a contribution to that dialogue.  We hope you’ll add your comments to reviewing your life on stage and screen.

 James Gandolfini      Movie musicals are so 1950 but this year has seen two innovative ones:  Julie Taymor’s “Across The Universe” and now, “Romance and Cigarettes”, written and directed by actor John Turturro.  Both have blue-collar protagonists,.  Similarities pretty much end there.

      Turturro’s hero Nick (James Gandolfini) is a middle-aged construction worker with a beautiful wife, Kitty, who is a dressmaker (Susan Sarandon) and three grown daughters.  When Kitty finds a note he wrote to his red-haired mistress Tula (Kate Winslet), life as he knew it effectively ends..  His day job involves ruminations high above the city towers with co-worker Angelo (Steve Buscemi).  The inarticulate characters’ emotions are expanded by pop music.  They burst into lipsynch at the drop of a feeling, sometimes as a group in topical costumes on the streets in their shabby neighborhood where each small house has a giant TV screen and a back yard with cement for grass where Nick’s daughters and boyfriend Fryburg (Bobby Cannavale) put on concerts, hoping their songs will someday reach a larger audience.

      Although this seems artificial at first,  the characters gradually draw us into their lives.  Elaine Stritch hits her marks as Nick’s Ma, as does Christopher Walken as Cousin Bo, but wonderful actors like Barbara Sukowa as Fryburg’s moher Gracie and Mary-Louise Parker as Constance don’t have enough to do. 

      However, this cast is a cornucopia of riches and Turturro’s use of songs reinforces Noel Coward’s comment,”Extroardinary how potent cheap music is.”  Tuturro mixes Italian passion with a style reminiscent of the writing of John Guare and John Patrick Shanley and the early work of Federico Fellini.  He’s in good company and those giants have a fresh talent to welcome to their pantheon.

       Making this movie work for you.  Many will have a love/hate relationship with this movie but what hangs around is the inevitability of passion, the many forms of love and the assuagement of music, cheap or otherwise.