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Romance & Cigarettes Reviewed By Rich Drees
Premiered at the Toronto Film Fest two years ago, the film has stayed in limbo due to the business machinations of a studio merger to the point that Turturro is distributing the film himself, which is a shame as that invariably means that it won’t get as wide an audience as it deserves.
Nick Murder (James Gandolfini) is an outer-borough New Yorker whose marriage with his wife Kitty (Susan Sarandon) has gone cold. Caught by Kitty having an affair with a fiery-haired Tula (Kate Winslet), he struggles to earn back the respect and love of his wife and three daughters.
Some people may
have problems with the musical numbers consisting of the characters
singing along to classic pop tracks, dismissing the conceit as
nothing more than glorified karaoke. But what Turturro does here is
bring to life the relationship that his characters, and by extension
the audience, has to music and the way it can resonate universal
experiences. When Nick is thrown out of his house, he breaks out
into Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Lonely Is A Man Without Love,” it
amplifies for the audience what the character is feeling as they
have their own similar associations to the song.
While it may be a function more of the film’s low budget, the sparsely choreographed numbers also help keeps us focus on the characters and not spectacle. That is to say that Turturro doesn’t make them visually interesting, with a small chorus line of pregnant woman dancing through a neighborhood street punctuating one song while another is performed underwater.
The cast, including the supporting players, gamely rises to the occasion of Turturro’s grand experiment. Winslet gamely and energetically vamps her way through her role. Christopher Walkin, as Kitty’s stuck-in-the-1950s cousin contributes an awkwardly brisk rendition of the Tom Jones hit “Delilah” that needs to be seen to be believed.
If there’s anything to complain about is that some of the supporting characters, including Steve Buscemi’s best friend and Eddie Izzard’s minister, seem to disappear midway through the film. A romantic subplot between daughter Mandy Moore and neighborhood lothario Bobby Canavale wraps up too quickly and too early, while daughter Mary-Louis Parker doesn’t have much to do, leaving one to speculate that much material hit the cutting room floor. But then again, that’s what the Special Features on DVDs are for. |
Romance & Cigarettes is a rather audacious film what it sets out
to do. Actor turned writer/director John Turturro has crafted an
intimate musical around the story of a failing marriage and one
man’s attempt to try and figure out what he should be doing to make
it better. But more interesting than even its story material is the
risky manner in which Turturro goes about presenting the musical
portion of the film. And surprisingly, it succeeds in spades.