Big Night

A low-key and highly entertaining indie comedy about two brothers (Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub) trying to make a go of their Italian restaurant without losing their cultural identity in the process.

Shalhoub is the chef stuck on tradition, who refuses to compromise his culinary integrity for whiney customers; Tucci is the more reasonable and business savvy brother who understands the need to change with the times. The acting is good all around, and the the food in the film looks so good I guarantee you will be starving before it is over.

Also with Minnie Driver, Ian Holm and Isabella Rossellini.

Grade: A-

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.

After having looked over my reviews on IMDb, I noticed that only one of them was enthusiastic. That should be rectified, since I consider myself a big fan of cinema, and I choose as my second enthusiastic recommendation Big Night. This is one of those films that doesn't have to show off. It's a slice of life sort of thing going on here, with an assortment of people with strengths and faults, but who all value life's simple pleasures, like good food. It's a story about the underdogs , and their hopes and dreams and struggles -- some within reach, some not. It's got a good cast too. They all make it look easy, but they have a charming script and careful direction. I think Billy Wilder would have approved. At turns funny and touching, and the last scene -- several minutes without a word of dialogue -- is pure gold.

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.

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.