Romance and Cigarettes
Directed by John Turturro
John Turturro experiments with his second directorial effort—a hybrid of working-class realism and musical-comedy fantasy—in the movie musical Romance & Cigarettes. It’s about a chain-smoking construction worker (James Gandolfini) philandering with an English lingerie clerk (Kate Winslet) and trying to placate his angry wife (Susan Sarandon). We see them sing along to the hit tunes in their heads that mirror their own circumstances (Tom Jones’ “Delilah,” Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart.”) Turturro’s point: Our shared pop heritage is wishful and poignant.
Taking the movie-musical seriously puts Turturro miles ahead of the recent awful Hollywood musical resurgence—Chicago, Moulin Rouge, Dreamgirls, Hairspray—that confuse personal musical expression with camp. To correct this, Romance & Cigarettes includes the artifice of adult actors playing teenagers (Mary-Louise Parker as Gandolfini and Sarandon’s daughter, Bobby Cannavale as her fiancé) and middle-aged people acting like Top-40-besotted teens. This emphasizes the average American’s adolescent inner life. When cops and garbage men dance in the suburban streets, it’s not just homage to West Side Story but an unabashed admission that the 1961 classic enhanced the quotidian view of self. In short, Romance & Cigarettes expresses a deep love of pop.
Encouraged by his producers, the Coen Brothers, Turturro shows affection for what makes movie-musicals matter as drama. There’s the same aesthetic bravura seen in the musical sequences of O, Brother Where Art Thou? and The Big Lebowski. But just as those films stopped short of full movie-musical bliss, Turturro’s bold effort lapses into pop music jokes. Songs background our silliest private extremes—whether in church, street fighting or lovelorn reminiscence (brother-in-law Christopher Walken waxing heartbroken over his lost love—but at least more sensible than his foolish role in Hairspray).
Does Turturro know the “Tammy” sequence in Terence Davies’ 1993 The Long Day Closes? It’s where the daily rituals of school, Catholic mass and moviegoing are underscored to a sentimental ballad, enlarging the significance of both pop and common life. Davies’ The Long Day Closes is one of the handful of truly great recent films; it used song to define desire and struggle and loneliness. Those are also Turturro’s themes, yet Romance & Cigarettes doesn’t come close to Davies’ ecstasy or agony. When Gandolfini forlornly recalls James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” the song itself is stronger than these trivially dramatized domestic crises. What should be Turturro’s “Tammy” becomes cute and campy. Turturro understands the emotion inside musicals but is too skeptical, or ultimately unskilled, to treat them with coherent depth.
Huge guess: This might have something to do with Turturro self-consciously transferring heterosexual consciousness into conspicuous pop. He hedges his bets and doesn’t fully give in to pop abandon as P.J. Hogan did when delightfully translating Dionne Warwick’s “Say a Little Prayer” in My Best Friend’s Wedding. In Turturro’s oddest scene, Gandolfini disparages Broadway musical legend Ethel Merman: “I never liked her. She intruded on our aloneness with that foghorn of a voice.” But this, in fact, is what’s crude. It’s as if Gandolfini/Turturro were afraid to admit the loneliness that Merman, Davies and Hogan confessed (and thereby transcended camp). Turturro aims for postmodern irony and misses. But slamming La Merman doesn’t mean crude people still won’t mistake him for a pansy.
Directed by John Turturro
John Turturro experiments with his second directorial effort—a hybrid of working-class realism and musical-comedy fantasy—in the movie musical Romance & Cigarettes. It’s about a chain-smoking construction worker (James Gandolfini) philandering with an English lingerie clerk (Kate Winslet) and trying to placate his angry wife (Susan Sarandon). We see them sing along to the hit tunes in their heads that mirror their own circumstances (Tom Jones’ “Delilah,” Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart.”) Turturro’s point: Our shared pop heritage is wishful and poignant.
Taking the movie-musical seriously puts Turturro miles ahead of the recent awful Hollywood musical resurgence—Chicago, Moulin Rouge, Dreamgirls, Hairspray—that confuse personal musical expression with camp. To correct this, Romance & Cigarettes includes the artifice of adult actors playing teenagers (Mary-Louise Parker as Gandolfini and Sarandon’s daughter, Bobby Cannavale as her fiancé) and middle-aged people acting like Top-40-besotted teens. This emphasizes the average American’s adolescent inner life. When cops and garbage men dance in the suburban streets, it’s not just homage to West Side Story but an unabashed admission that the 1961 classic enhanced the quotidian view of self. In short, Romance & Cigarettes expresses a deep love of pop.
Encouraged by his producers, the Coen Brothers, Turturro shows affection for what makes movie-musicals matter as drama. There’s the same aesthetic bravura seen in the musical sequences of O, Brother Where Art Thou? and The Big Lebowski. But just as those films stopped short of full movie-musical bliss, Turturro’s bold effort lapses into pop music jokes. Songs background our silliest private extremes—whether in church, street fighting or lovelorn reminiscence (brother-in-law Christopher Walken waxing heartbroken over his lost love—but at least more sensible than his foolish role in Hairspray).
Does Turturro know the “Tammy” sequence in Terence Davies’ 1993 The Long Day Closes? It’s where the daily rituals of school, Catholic mass and moviegoing are underscored to a sentimental ballad, enlarging the significance of both pop and common life. Davies’ The Long Day Closes is one of the handful of truly great recent films; it used song to define desire and struggle and loneliness. Those are also Turturro’s themes, yet Romance & Cigarettes doesn’t come close to Davies’ ecstasy or agony. When Gandolfini forlornly recalls James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” the song itself is stronger than these trivially dramatized domestic crises. What should be Turturro’s “Tammy” becomes cute and campy. Turturro understands the emotion inside musicals but is too skeptical, or ultimately unskilled, to treat them with coherent depth.
Huge guess: This might have something to do with Turturro self-consciously transferring heterosexual consciousness into conspicuous pop. He hedges his bets and doesn’t fully give in to pop abandon as P.J. Hogan did when delightfully translating Dionne Warwick’s “Say a Little Prayer” in My Best Friend’s Wedding. In Turturro’s oddest scene, Gandolfini disparages Broadway musical legend Ethel Merman: “I never liked her. She intruded on our aloneness with that foghorn of a voice.” But this, in fact, is what’s crude. It’s as if Gandolfini/Turturro were afraid to admit the loneliness that Merman, Davies and Hogan confessed (and thereby transcended camp). Turturro aims for postmodern irony and misses. But slamming La Merman doesn’t mean crude people still won’t mistake him for a pansy.
