Romance and Cigarettes

Romance and Cigarettes

John Turturro, 2005

The best cast film ever. It's like John Turturro, writer and director, wrote the script with the personalities of his friends in Hollywood, then got them to come down for filming. I mean, the smallest possible parts are played by Amy Sedaris and Eddie Izzard.

It's the sort of nepotism from which everybody benefits. It was truly a delight to watch a most bizarre combination of Moulin Rouge and American Splendor—the white trash musical. Where all the dysfunctional adulterers and their children in crappy ticky-tacky houses lipsynch to bad pop music.

Which description will make you think this film could be little more than tacky melodrama all on its own. Thus we come back to the cast, and add to it deft direction and succinct writing. Turturro has written the last couple months of an everyman's life and manages to express the poignancy of every day leading up to the end. Seriously difficult without drooping over into the cartoonish.

He accomplishes this by giving each character our everyman, Nick Murder (James Gandolfini), interacts with complete characterization. There are a few flat characters, but they have 5 lines between them. And, even then Gene Vincent, Frances, Fruitman, and the Policeman are positioned with such conflicting one liners to what their characters are doing, and how they are directed to play it off, that they pop.

Next tier up we have Nick and his wife Kitty (Susan Sarandon)'s daughters and neighbors. They each have the same amount of pop, but because of two or three whole scenes they are allowed to dominate.

At the top we have Nick, Kitty and Nick's mistress Tula (Kate Winslet), and man do they sizzle. Or, at least, the women do. I've never seen The Sopranos, but I don't think Gandolfini is doing much different here. Maybe yell and kill a little less, sing a little more. But he doesn't have to. That's the beauty of being an Everyman.

Sarandon, though, really pulls a new face every shot. She bounds from disgust and a caricature of hatred to flat concentration to pure mothering condescension. Winslet, accordingly, spits out the most amazing strings of hyper-sexual, cockney vulgarities while throwing her body around in a way actresses just don't do anywhere else.

And, on top of that, there's singing involved.

You get the idea that it's one of those French New Wave things, where Turturro wondered how best he could throw his own art-house weight around in the film world. But, at the same time, he only sticks in a song when, if you were the character, you would cease expressing yourself fully if you didn't sing. Your pain just would not be expressed fully without various electricians and dustmen dropping their jobs to dance around you, helping you express this new loss.

It's well done. Thanks to most of it being lip-synched, the choice of songs being common and popular, and the blocking, editing and dialogue blending the uber-real through surreal dream-like sequences into full song and dance, it feels genuine. It's genuine in a way that High School Musical would hemorrhage and Mystic River tries just so damn hard for.

Thank you John Turturro.