Cinema
Big Night (15, selected cinemas)
Feast your eyes
Mark Steyn Iheartily recommend both Big Night the film and Big Night the CD, though for dif- ferent reasons. The CD features Rosemary Clooney's 'Mambo Italiano', Louis Prima's `Buona Sera', and is the most fun you'll get from a sound-track album this year. The film, on the other hand, is an antidote to the record.
In the Fifties, America went crazy for everything Italian — if by everything you mean a steaming mound of spaghetti and meatballs served up in an exuberant mamma-mia atmosphere with a swarthy Excuse me, love, but do you do bed 'n' breakfast?' exhibitionist bellowing 'Angelina' and `Zooma Zooma' and other neo-Neopoli- tana in the background. (At the time, Allan Sherman did a parody laundry-list of the various fads, to the tune of `Funiculi, Funicula': 'Gina, Gina Lollobrigida/I like her but que sera, sera etc.') Louis Prima was Italian in all the most lucrative senses of the word, the wildest night-club act in town, specialising in vocal demolition jobs on incompatible medleys ('When You're Smiling' and 'The Sheik of Araby') and incompatible duets, with his refined wife Keely Smith (in Britain, he's known, if at all, as the voice of The Jungle Book's king of the swingers). So, when two Italian brothers, their New Jersey restaurant under threat of foreclosure by the bank, are offered the chance to throw a party for Prima, they decide to stake everything on one 'big night' — in the hope that the band leader's endorsement will catapult them into that all-American big time they heard so much about back in the old country.
The trouble is neither of the brothers, Primo (Tony Shalhoub) or Secondo (Stan- ley Tucci), is cut out to be that type of Ital- ian. Their restaurant, the. Paradise, is quiet and understated, and so are they. When first we see them, Secondo is trying to explain to a disgruntled Jersey diner why Primo's speciality, a seafood risotto of his own creation, does not come with a side order of spaghetti and meatballs. Primo is a child-like, unworldly sort, or at any rate un-New Worldly: he doesn't drive, and prefers to remain in the kitchen. Primo cares about pasta, but Secondo is pasta car- ing: his brother, he feels, is holding him back. 'If you give people time, they learn,' says Primo, defending his risotto. 'This is a restaurant,' says Secondo, 'not a fucking school.' But Secondo is as much a fish out of water as anything in the seafood risotto. When he closes up early and wanders over to the competition, a noisy, blaring joint run by Pascal, with a gal singer doing a pop version of '0 Sole Mio', he looks as if he's landed on another planet. Tellingly, when Pascal offers to let him throw a party for his showbiz pal, Secondo's never heard of Louis Prima. But his American neighbours — the florist and the Cadillac salesman get pretty excited, and Secondo allows him- self to be carried along.
I don't think it's giving anything away to say that Big Night is a fairly ironic title and that Louis Prima functions here as a swing- ing Godot or Lefty. At first, as you're root- ing for the brothers, you figure that maybe Prima's spirit will invigorate them and spur them on to triumph. And then you notice that, unusually in this sort of film, the music seems to be an intrusion. And, even as the wine is flowing and the packed restaurant is jiving away, you sense that this kind of 'big night' will never be the broth- ers' scene. The evening is a sort of success, but thanks to the food. The best meal I will ever have,' declares Pascal's mistress, played by Isabella Rossellini — and you believe her: Big Night gives you one of the best zuppa-to-dolci blow-by-blow blowouts ever captured on film: unlike Babette's Feast, this food is evidently intended to be eaten rather than admired, Primo's master- piece, a 'tympani' pasta from an old family recipe, deserves a Special Achievement Oscar.
Matching the meal is the cast, especially Rossellini and, as a glorious comic apotheosis of extrovert Italian manhood, a roaring, scenery-chewing Ian Holm: 'Eet ees never too much! Eet ees only not enough! Bite your teeth into thee ass of life!' In another cunning piece of casting, Britain's Minnie Driver is cast as Secondo's wholesomely American girlfriend. Tucci and Shalhoub, who play the brothers, are best known from unshowy detailed charac- ter roles on television (Tucci was the sinis- ter, inscrutable Richard Cross in Murder One), and they turn in a couple of beauti- fully detailed readings.
The trouble with so many small Ameri- can films is that they're also small in spirit, small in theme: they're not about anything. On a shoestring budget, Big Night has pro- duced something big at heart and big in its concerns, as well as a rich evocation of Ital- ian American life in the Fifties. Stanley Tucci, who co-directed the film with fellow actor Campbell Scott and co-wrote it with his cousin Joseph Tropiano, deserves spe- cial credit.
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