I’ve fallen in love with plenty of imperfect movies. There was Donnie Darko, a film whose haphazard, cross-genre narrative I forgave because it cut right to the core of how weird and perilous it feels to be a depressed teenager. And Benny & Joon, a sweet, just-shy-of-precious story that was redeemed by genuine filial warmth and Johnny Depp’s knockout Charlie Chaplin impersonation — good enough (I like to imagine) that the Little Tramp was probably up in heaven cheering wildly as they filmed.
John Turturro’s Romance & Cigarettes is just such a flawed but decent flick. Set in working-class Queens, it’s that age-old tale about midlife misbehavior and its resounding effects. John Updike’s Rabbit series, American Beauty, Married With Children — the zeitgeist is replete with examples. But there’s reason to make room for one more. Because Turturro’s Nick Murder (played by James Gandolfini) bares his soul in a way other anti-heros have not.
What’s his beef? Not entrapment or tedium or the chains binding him to a dead-end job. No, Murder is simply LONELY. Or more precisely — and in a human way, I think — he’s afraid of being alone. And in a scene very near the beginning of this odd music-smattered film, the stubbly bridge worker lets himself out of his squalorous, smoke fume-filled house to serenade the neighborhood with his sorry state: "Lonely is a man without love."
Of course, he isn’t without love. He’s merely stuck in the thirty-year slump of a long and encumbered marriage. And his wife, Kitty — Susan Sarandon, who is as lovely and foul-mouthed as she was 16 years ago in Thelma and Louise — is onto him. She’s a devout Catholic who uses the word "twat" as easily as she says the rosary. She knows her husband is fooling around. And chances are, she also knows why.
Egged on by his know-it-all friend, played by Steve Buscemi, Murder not only has an affair with a trampy, British lingerie saleswoman (Kate Winslet) who eats chicken in bed and invites him to "open her back door," he gets circumcised for her. And this is where the magic of Turturro comes in. Because he alone has put forth one fact of life that at least fifty percent of the population never understood: Grown men in long-term relationships still obsess over their oddly-shaped penises. . . .the same way women fret over their flappy post-pregnancy stomachs and widening hips.
Romance & Cigarettes is one extended explication of the male mind: Murder imagines his girlfriend dressed in red and shimmying through a burning house while firemen below wield their out-of-control "hose" like a powerful snaky phallus. He leaves the raising of his three daughters — creatures around the same age as his mistress who clearly bewilder him — to his wife. And he cowers in the presence of his mother, whose dominance is so emasculating it makes circumcision entirely beside the point.
The movie is very uneven. Its plot takes turns that are not only unexpected, they don’t, in truth, make much sense. This, likely, is why Romance & Cigarettes bounced around Hollywood for two years after MGM was bought out by Sony and wrote the film off.
I sympathize with the naysayers. This movie is raggedly written and refuses to stay put in one category: drama, comedy, muscial, or indie-style slice-of-life. Yet it’s saved not only by Turturro’s brash revelations about the male psyche, but also by a supporting cast that includes Mary Louise Parker, Christopher Walken, and the superb dowager Elaine Stritch.
In perhaps the most inconceivable "twist" on the story of this film, Adam Sandler intervened with studio executives and asked that his friend Turturro’s film be given a limited distribution. Thus, on the power of the mighty Wedding Singer, it was.
And I’m glad for that. Because thanks to Romance & Cigarettes, I may finally understand what’s going on in men’s heads.
Opening December 7th at the Landmark Edina Cinema.
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