Big Night - Nacht der Genüsse

Big Night was one of the sleeper hits of 1996. A comedy starring an ensemble cast including the two directors Tucci and Campbell Scott, this is very much an actors movie. The script is funny at times and slow at others. All the scenes involving food and especially the ones with the chef Primo are great. The only let-down was the last twenty minutes where everything seemed to fall apart. The entire cast (especially the vastly underrated Campbell Scott) does a great job. There's a great scene with Minnie Driver in the sea coming out all wet - hot! Another great food movie I recall is Babette's Feast. That was more religion-drama and not comedy though. The style of this film is faintly reminiscent of Woody Allen. This film will appeal to all Louis Prima fans.

Big Night is a peaceful joy to watch because its themes and the overall feeling of the film is so normal. The characters, so beautifully rich, are realistic and so are their problems. The characters are mainly wonderfully, infectiously bombastic Italians, and entire scenes are sometimes constructed of the process of making Italian food from scratch. The subtlety and unaffronting reality of these qualities are so endearing to me. In fact, the scene that leaves an imprint on me more than any of the others, despite how fun it is to see the actors have a blast playing fiery, thick-mustachioed men with heavy Italian accents, is a scene that hardly has a connection with any of the others. An Italian ballad is playing over the soundtrack through the previous scene and continues into this scene, wherein Marc Anthony, playing a low-level restaurant bus boy, a small, quiet, incidental character, begins dancing with himself as he mops the floor of the restaurant. When other characters enter, the music, coming from nowhere but the film's soundtrack itself, cuts off and he continues mopping the floor as if the dancing never happened. It's so touching for that scene to have been slipped in, giving a person who is only against the background of everyone's lives a dreamy, sensitive personality that he keeps to himself.

The focal point of the film is the chemistry between the characters of Stanley Tucci, playing a hard-working, pleading, frustrated restaurant owner, whose head carries only logic and a goal for success, and Tony Shalhoub, his brother, whose aggressive passion is for the food he cooks and the mystery and subtext within it, yet his interaction with people is painfully shy. Their clashes of pride, their battles with each other's completely different perspectives, and yet their sharing of the same dream are what drives the story.

A lot of the film's humor comes from the hilarity of Ian Holm. Ian Holm, a stiff-limbed Englishman, plays here a loud, very animated, hot-tempered Italian entrepreneur with a seamless and wonderfully entertaining delivery of an Italian accent and Italian movements. It's my favorite performance of his because I had never before imagined that he would play a role like this.

Big Night is not a masterpiece nor do I think it was even meant to be one, but what it is is subtle and interesting for purely human reasons. It's soundtrack is also a fantastic celebration of Italian music.

I can't even begin to explain how much I love this film. First, it may be one of the great "food movies" of all time. Anyone who considers him/herself a lover of good food and doesn't drool over the "timpano" alone should check their pulse... And the performances are remarkably restrained, yet lively. Stanley Tucci is sublime, Tony Shalhoub is, as always, a marvel. Truly interesting camerawork that draws one in, yet doesn't detract (or distract) from the story or the characters. Because, at its heart, this is a character-driven piece -- about the love and mutual respect shared by two strong-willed siblings. Someday I will take part in a feast like that shared by the characters in this film, and on that day, I will be an extraordinarily happy man. Until then, I'll watch this movie again and again.

Little seems to know that our beloved screen-chameleon Stanley Tucci has a low-profile director career, with five features under his belt to this day, which all started with BIG NIGHT, a food-porn interspersed with fraternal clashes, co-directed with his high-school friend Campbell Scott.

Tucci is a formidable triple-threat in the picture, apart from taking credit in the script department, he plays the central character Secondo ("second" in Italian), an Italian immigrant in New Jersey in the 1950s, he opens a restaurant called Paradise with his perfectionist elder brother Primo (for sure, it means "first" in Italian, played by Shalhoub), who is a chief par excellence but cannot deign himself to accommodate the eclectic American taste, for him, it is the "rape" of the love of his life. Therefore, the business is gloomy, as the manager, Secondo is equipped with street smart and intent to sink his teeth into making good in the promise land. The titular "big night" is game- changer vouchsafed by their benevolent competitor Pascal (Holm), who runs an eponymous restaurant nearby with success (first you cook what the customers want, and after that you can teach them what to eat!). Financially strapped, the brothers go for broke and organize a lavish banquet to entertain the popular singer Louis Prima as their last resort, but, there is a catch, is Pascal's deed really altruistic, does he have an axe to grind?

Although both Tucci and Shalhoub's strained American accents cannot escape a born-and-raised Italian ear (not this reviewer anyhow), the performances are barnstorming: Tucci turns head in his no-holds-barred incarnation of someone who is at once aspirant and frustrated, self-deceiving and delectably sympathetic (albeit his bed-hopping habit and an eye-rolling treatment of being caught red-handed near the end); Shalhoub, on the other hand, constrains himself to evince a more ambivalent timber of Primo, whose presence is often waffling between being stubbornly selfish (claiming he is unable to make a sacrifice, but the truth is, he just doesn't want to do something degrading his bloated ego, it is never about Italian gastronomy, he is too afraid to be a fish out of water) and so ineptly reticent (with his capacity of English lexicon wavering implausibly in between different scenes, and a bonhomous Allison Janney is criminally underutilized as his possible love interest); but the true unsung hero in the movie is Ian Holm, who gives a fantastically Janus-faced impersonation peppered with either effervescence or stolidness. Unfortunately, the film fails to pass the Bechdel test, yet between Minnie Driver's lackadaisical girlfriend and Isabella Rossellini's sultry lover, Secondo's two-timing subplot cannot outstrip the consanguineous squabble and affinity.

By and large, BIG NIGHT is an effusive ethnographic study of Italians in America garnished with a profusion of music, gusto and humor, also gets to the bottom of the soi-disant American Dream with a bitter-sweet introspection, although with its closing long-take brazening out the life-goes- on truism, the ending seems to make a virtue out of necessity, why not leave us something more concrete to chew over after the rolling credits, or are the filmmakers simply running out of ideas to consummate a less self-aware culmination? The jury is out there.

This movie is fantastic. You feel like you are on the Jersey shore and can smell the sauce being cooked. Even Minnie Driver is great! Eat something first because the food consumed and prepared during the movie will have you drooling.