De Caso com a Máfia

The mobster 'Cucumber' Frank de Marco (Alec Baldwin) is married with the housewife Angela de Marco (Michelle Pfeiffer) and she in unhappy with their marriage and wants the divorce. Frank is having a love affair with Karen Lutnick (Nancy Travis), who is the mistress of his boss Tony 'The Tiger' Russo (Dean Stockwell). When Tony discovers their love affair, he kills them in a party. Tony is under surveillance of the FBI agents Mike Downey (Matthew Modine) and Ed Benitez (Oliver Platt) and during the wake, Tony kisses Angela. The agents and Tony's wife Connie Russo (Mercedes Ruehl) believe that the widow Angela is having an affair with Tony. Angela takes the opportunity to move from the suburbs to a small apartment in New York with her son. Meanwhile Mike bugs her apartment and soon they fall in love with each other. But Tony discovers her new address and courts her. Soon the FBI Senior Management blackmails Angela to force her to get close to Tony to help the FBI to arrest him and she discovers that Mike is an agent. Will Angela give a second chance to Mike?

"Married to the Mob" is another great film from the 80's, directed by Jonathan Demme and with a story with comedy, romance and action. The chemistry between Michelle Pfeiffer and Matthew Modine is impressive but Mercedes Ruehl steals the show. There is cameo participation of famous people and this movie is still attractive and has not aged after being watched many times along almost thirty years. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "De Caso com a Máfia" ("In an Affair with the Mafia")

Michelle Pfeiffer and Matthew Modine are a joy to watch in this screwball comedy. Alec Baldwin, who was an up and coming star when the film was made, is a hoot. Dean Stockwell, in a sendup of John Gotti, is hysterical. But Mercedes Ruehl, as the paranoid and over the top Connie steals the movie.

Jonathan Demme, previously known for wacky comedies like "Something Wild" and "Melvin and Howard"-proves once again that he is a genius. I was not surprised at all when he went on to win the Oscar for directing "Silence of The Lambs." The performances he evokes from his actors in "Married" are inspired, and the audience is taken along for a wild and wooly ride.

One of the cutest, most endearing films of the 80's, it stands head and shoulders above many of the satires of its era.

I had to write this review because the only user comments on file don't begin to do this film justice. For one thing, Michelle Pfeiffer is TERRIFIC in this role -- she demonstrates a marvelous comedic style we don't often get to see. (Maybe the other reviewer prefers her serious work, but I dispute the comment that Pfeiffer has "matured" beyond this role. It's a comedy, for goodness' sake!)

And yes, Alec Baldwin is quite good, but it's Matthew Modine who steals the picture! (He also has much more screen time.) Mercedes Ruehl and Dean Stockwell (as Tony 'The Tiger' Russo) are absolutely delicious. The plot is delightful, and sometimes manages to touch on some more somber issues, as all great comedies do.

In short, I've seen this hilarious film two or three times over the years, and thinking about it now makes me eager to watch it all over again!

This is a consistently funny story with some serious action scenes thrown in here and there. That combination of mob movie and comedy makes this a fun film to watch.l The characters in this movie are just that: characters. Everyone is a little off, actually a little too wacky for any believability. It's just a outrageous story played for laughs with few things making sense or being realistic.

Michelle Pfeiffer and Matthew Modine are the stars but Mercedes Ruehl steals the show, in my opinion, as the jealous wife. Dean Stockwell is great as the smooth mob man. Even with all the makeup to make her look cheap, Pfeiffer ("Angela de Marco") still can't hide that fabulous face. The costumes in here are great, too.

This is not family fare with a deserved R-rating for language, violence and some nudity but it's not really a rough movie. It has its charms, that's for sure. Modine plays the nice guy "Mike Downey."

Note: stay with the ending credits, because there is a lot of footage of scenes that never made it to the movie but were very interesting.

A movie sometimes, actually, most of the time, needs a nudge in the right casting direction. For Married to the Mob, we have Michelle Pfeiffer and Dean Stockwell in two big roles, and others for Matthew Modine and Mercedes Ruehl to sink their teeth into, too. Each actor takes over the role in his or her own way, and makes these characters into well-rounded people. The key for Jonathan Demme is this: people. They're not simply cartoon figures in a farce, but like in a good ol' screwball comedy from the days of Cary Grant, we got a premise and story that begs for actors who are so smart that they can get playing dumb, or just off-kilter or a little deranged. When we see Pfeiffer here, we believe that she's at a crossroads in her life, and she doesn't play it for laughs. Instead, she lets others around her go more over the top. In another story, she would be just as believable as an uncertain widow with a past she'd rather forget.

And yes, Dean Stockwell is here in another gob-smackingly good acting gig (he even got an unlikely supporting actor nod for it). There's something about the guy that is just a little creepy, not really his fault, per-say, except that it's something in his eyes, his mannerisms, the way he'll glance at a character he doesn't trust or has something really to say to. He did this perfectly in his one scene in Blue Velvet, and to a more restrained extent in Tucker The Man & His Dream. Here, however, he goes to town as a mob-boss caricature, but he also doesn't do ALL of the heavy lifting. He is still subtle compared to Ruehl's turn as Russo's wife, who has insane jealousy (and rightfully so, perhaps, if not so far as she goes), and is so over the top that she does her best to chew scenery every which way she can.

So then, with a good premise, and some fine supporting actors (Alec Baldwin has a few decent moments too), what's the problem? I think, perhaps, Demme wasn't always sure how to take the comedy where it needed to go. The script has the characters playing up behavior, which works well when, for example, Modine's "Mike Smith" is caught in a rock and a hard place in going out on a date with Angela. But other set-pieces sort of fall flat, and the ending is unsatisfying (especially irritating is Demme's decision to put in deleted clips from the film in the end credits, his way of doing 'outtakes'). And some of the dialog is over-cooked, making the actors strain to make it credible consistently.

But Married to the Mob is fun within a certain frame of mind. It plays up some clichés like it's going out of style (which is sort of did) and leaves out others, and you may enjoy seeing the actors enjoying themselves in the scenes. It's a lighthearted affair, with touches of appropriate mob violence, and David Byrne of the Talking Heads doing the music!