This is a total charmer.
Director Stephen Chbosky’s quiet dramedy is inspired by actual events — which are adorable in their own right — although Liz Maccie’s script takes liberties with what actually went down, in order to generate enough dramatic tension for a two-hour film.
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| Joe (Vince Vaughn) challenges each of his new chefs — from left, Roberta (Lorraine Bracco) Teresa (Talia Shire) and Antonella (Brenda Vaccaro) — to amaze him with one of their best dishes. |
Chbosky’s film also has strong echoes of 1996’s Big Night, in the sense of lovingly prepared food bonding strangers into a “family” they get to choose.
This also joins the ranks of all-time best “foodie movies,” right up there with Babette’s Feast, Chocolat, Tom Jones and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. You’ll be ravenous before this one’s half done.
And when blessed with a cast top-lined by the always enjoyable Vince Vaughn — who gets plenty of competition from his quartet of veteran scene-stealing co-stars — what’s not to love?
The setting is a working-class Italian neighborhood in present-day New York. Joe Scaravella (Vaughn), a single MTA worker, has recently lost his mother; on this day, the house he shared with her is laden with loving friends and sympathetic well-wishers. Vaughn’s bearing throughout is note-perfect: somber, quick with a polite smile when addressed, but with a faraway gaze that bespeaks bereavement, abandonment and the hopelessness that comes from wondering what the next day will be like ... and the one after that, and the one after that.
Everybody eventually departs, having left a home-cooked token of love.
Memory flashbacks show an adolescent Joe watching in rapt fascination, at the edge of the family kitchen, as his mother and nonna (grandmother) prepare a meal; every ingredient is added in just the right amount, from memory and long practice.
Joe grew up retaining this fascination with food, and has become a respectable scratch cook ... within limits. He’s never been able to nail down the ingredients in his nonna’s Sunday gravy.
As the days inevitably pass, longtime best friend Bruno (Joe Manganiello) and his outspoken wife Stella (Drea de Matteo) encourage Joe to use his inheritance money for something fun, or wild, or meaningful ... but definitely new. Joe takes that advice in the worst possible way, and makes a down payment on a dilapidated former Staten Island restaurant, a ferry ride away from his home and work.
And announces that he intends to create a restaurant where all the chefs are nonnas.
Bruno and Stella are thunderstruck, the former citing all manner of practical reasons why this is a terrible, awful, no-good idea. Joe, unmoved, wheedles Bruno into helping with the necessary demolition and reconstruction. (Handy, that Bruno’s a contractor.)
Vaughn and Manganiello share an easygoing rapport that deftly conveys Joe and Bruno’s longtime friendship, dating back to adolescence. Each clearly would do anything for the other.
That leaves finding the chefs.
Joe starts with Roberta (Lorraine Bracco), his mother’s best friend of 60 years, whom he regularly visits. She has strong opinions about everything, particularly Italian food and her generations-old recipe for capuzzelle.
She also regards, with suspicion, his carefully worded “chefs wanted” ad via social media.
“Who’s this Craig?” Roberta demands, when he attempts to explain online consumer-to-consumer commerce.
“Not a who,” Joe gamely replies, with Vaughn’s signature deadpan humor and snark. “More like an it.”
The ad draws two responses. The feisty Antonella (Brenda Vaccaro) arrives accompanied by her devoted neighbor, Olivia (Linda Cardellini). A bit later, they’re joined by mousy Teresa (Talia Shire), who eventually explains that she’s a former nun. As the icing on the cake, Joe persuades his mother’s lifelong friend and hairdresser, the cheerfully earthy Gia (Susan Sarandon), to handle desserts.
The necessary first step is a cook-off between Antonella, Roberta and Teresa; this proves combustible when Antonella (Sicilian) and Roberta (Bolognese) reveal their hatred for each other’s roots, resulting in a fracas that the quietly diligent Teresa — ever the peacemaker — vainly attempts to defuse.
“Let them work it out,” Joe suggests, from long experience with such things.
None of what follows will come as a surprise — would this movie even exist, without its inevitable outcome? — but that’s beside the point. Spending two hours with these eight well-crafted characters is a joyous celebration of love, friendship, nostalgia — for the way things “used to be” — and meticulously remembered, well-crafted recipes that hearken back generations.
Tempers occasionally fray; friendships briefly run aground; all manner of challenges emerge as frustrating setbacks, the worst being health and safety code inspections. Joe remains resolute, maintaining the unshaken belief characterized by the marvelous explanation of theatrical chaos in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love: “The natural condition is one of unsurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster, [but] strangely enough, it all turns out well.”
The four veteran actresses are a hoot ’n’ a holler, particularly after fences are mended over a bottle (or two?) of Limoncello. Cardellini has a quieter role, but it’s no less engaging, given that Olivia and Joe shared a disastrous prom night, back in the day.
Vaughn has the astonishing ability to simultaneously appear morosely hangdog and mischievously endearing, particularly when delivering an impeccably timed one-liner.
Marcelo Zarvos’ gentle score shares screen time with well-placed international pop classics such as “Funiculi Funicula,” “Tarantella Napoletana,” “A Roma Tutto è Bello” and a hilariously placed, Italian-language handling of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” And of course Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” drifts in at a choice moment.
The end credits are interspersed with brief clips from the actual Joe Scaravella’s 35-seat Enoteca Maria, which he opened in 2007 as an homage to his mother Maria and grandmother Domenica. What began as an Italian establishment has morphed into an international affair, its kitchen now staffed by grandma chefs from all over the world.
“This is not a restaurant,” he explained, in last week’s interview with Time Magazine. “It walks like a restaurant, smells like a restaurant, talks like a restaurant, but it’s not a restaurant. It’s a cultural exchange.”
God knows we need more of that, these days.
We also need more beguiling “little films” like this one.
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