Food, Glorious Food: “Big Night”

I’ve always enjoyed movies about cooking. Given that we all have to eat, I guess it’s not remarkable that food preparation can be used in so many ways to comment on the human condition. In the 1987 Danish film Babette’s Feast, a French refugee introduces an austere Scandinavian family to the joys of good food . . . and by extension the earthy pleasures of life.  Taiwan-born director Ang Lee, in his 1994 Eat Drink Man Woman, uses a retired chef cooking for his adult daughters as a way to explore Chinese  tradition as well as the relationship between generations. In 2023’s The Taste of Things, starring the luminous Juliette Binoche, a pairing involving love and loss unfolds through the relationship of a gourmet and his loyal cook. And we can’t forget the Pixar animated film, Ratatouille, which proves that you’re never too small to be very good in the kitchen.

 Earlier this year, Netflix presented Nonnas, a star-studded TV movie based on the real-life story of a New York man. He paid tribute to his late mother’s talents as a home cook by launching a popular Staten Island restaurant in which the kitchen is staffed by a clutch of Italian mamas. This slight but charming film is notable for casting veteran actresses of Italian descent (like Lorraine Bracco, Brenda Vaccaro, and Talia Shire), and having them fight epic stove-top battles over cooking techniques and regional specialties.

 Then there’s Big Night, a 1996 labor of love co-written and co-directed by Stanley Tucci. Tucci, a hyper-versatile character actor who was Oscar-nominated for playing an ominous neighbor in 2009’s The Lovely Bones, is most fondly remembered (by me, at least) as a sympathetic gay art director in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada. He also made an impressively down-to-earth Roman Catholic cardinal in last year’s Conclave.

 Throughout his career, Tucci has not been shy about proclaiming his love for good cooking, especially of the Italian variety. In 2021 he hosted  Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, a CNN series that followed him through the land of his ancestors. That same year he published Taste: My Life Through Food, a memoir that spent sixteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Other Tucci publications include What I Ate in One Year and several cookbooks.

 So it’s no surprise that when Tucci set about to make an original film, he put food preparation at its center. Big Night casts Tucci and Tony Shalhoub (of Lebanese descent but comfortable playing a wide range of nationalities) as Italian-born brothers determined to create a fine-dining restaurant near the New Jersey shore. In the film, Primo (Shalhoub) is the older brother, an artist in the kitchen who’s intolerant of shortcuts and trendy gimmicks. Tucci himself plays Secundo, the would-be practical brother who’s determined to see the business succeed, but has his own lapses into fantasyland. While locals cram into a livelier but far less authentic Italian-American bistro nearby, the brothers are desperate to stay afloat. That’s when, for reasons the film makes clear, the duo decide to risk everything on an elaborate gourmet banquet that’s spectacular but in many ways poorly conceived. This is a story about the restaurant business—yes!—but even more about the push-and-pull relationship between two brothers with very different visions of what they want to achieve in life.

 Big Night is not an Oscar-winning kind of movie. But it nabbed several writing awards, including an Independent Spirit nod for Best First Screenplay. Clearly, Tucci’s got talent in areas other than acting, and I can’t help wondering what he’ll serve us next. 

 (Here's a fascinationg addendum, provided by Hillel Schwartz, a friend and loyal reader:)  Stanley Tucci played Paul Child (Julia Child's husband) in the 2009 movie Julie & Julia. Tucci wrote about his deep admiration for Julia Child in his Taste and in an article for TIME Magazine: https://time.com/6103409/stanley-tucci-taste-julia-child/.  Ironically, Tucci was diagnosed in 2017 with a tumor at the base of his tongue, and lost his sense of taste and smell, but this was successfully treated with chemotherapy and radiation, although he had to have a feeding tube for six months. And now his co-star in Big Night, Tony Shalhoub, has his own tv series, where he goes around tasting versions of bread in different ethnic cuisines.

Spoiler Alert: Seeing The Last of Mrs. Maisel

Well, Midge Maisel has gone to her reward, which seems to involve lounging on a couch in a mansion, watching Jeopardy with still-buddy Susie. It’s not the ending I would have chosen for the final season of this memorable sitcom. But wrap-ups are hard. All the emotion we’ve put into watching the evolution of the often fractious Maisel/Weissman clan  over five years of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is supposed to pay off in the final episodes. But for me, the fifth season turned out to be a hodgepodge of scrambled stories, skipping back and forth through time in an effort to sum up everyone’s situation. I would have been content to see Midge—the affluent late  Fifties housewife who was dumped by her Nice Jewish Boy husband, only to discover her natural gift for stand-up comedy—go out either a winner or a loser. But the writers seemed to want to have it both ways. Midge scores the TV gig that makes everyone, both family and the viewing public, adore her.  Hooray! But then we have to endure the painful disintegration of her friend, Lenny Bruce, and several additional mordant moments  before that couch scene (featuring Susie in a mop of a grey wig and a caftan) with its final fadeout.

 The fifth season has been like that from start to finish. Several episodes begin, at first bafflingly, with flash-forwards to Midge’s now-adult children. I liked the possibilities of a full-grown Ethan picking vegetables and studying rabbinics on an Israeli kibbutz, though Midge suddenly landing in a helicopter to check out him and his cranky Sabra bride seems a pretty lame joke. As for daughter Esther, previously seen only as tiny child, it took me a while to figure out that SHE had grown up to be the brilliant young scientist discussing family with her shrink in this season’s opening episode. There is also a wacky suggestion that Midge is at one point about to marry novelist Philip Roth in a lavish Hawaiian ceremony. This brief plot strand—enlivened by parents Rose and Abe’s predictable hysteria—quickly disappears both from the series and from the characters’ psyches, as do some of the key relationships from previous seasons. Case in point: ex-husband Joel’s feisty Chinese-American spouse-to-be, along with their impending child. (Actress Stephanie Hsu who played Mei Lin,  has done very well for herself lately, nabbing an Oscar nomination for Everything Everywhere All at Once. So perhaps she had to be surgically removed from Joel’s and the viewer’s mind.)

 Why was I a fan of this series? Perhaps because it was such a funny and familiar take on ethnic tribalism, along with an acknowledgment of what young women faced in the Mad Men era Two of my favorite characters were Midge’s parents, played by Marin Hinkle and the invaluable Tony Shalhoub. Their obsessions with style (her) and intellectualism (him) always rang true, and their relationship with one another had the hilarious push-and-pull of many a marriage. Their firm grasp of their Jewish social and religious values were, to me at least, funny but never insulting. My very favorite season was the one in which the whole family group decamps to a legendary resort in the Catskills (read: Grossinger’s). Later, when the resort’s beloved social director opens a play on Broadway, Abe is put in the terrible position having to review this stinker for the Village Voice. Quickly he pays the price, as an entire congregation of his peers audibly shames him during High Holiday services for betraying one of their own. It’s uproariously funny, and it sure feels real.

 

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: No One Loves a Critic!

I’m overjoyed to see The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel back on the tube. Though the first segment of the show’s final season was frequently gibberish, with too many plot strands being introduced far too quickly, the weeks since then have returned to what’s best about Mrs. Maisel: that lovably wacky family unit full of well-heeled misfits and hangers-on who cling together, no matter what. The episode I watched this past week is the best yet: full of family dinners, outrageous hats, and a bar mitzvah to die for. Actually, dying is somewhat of a theme of this episode, in which the pugnacious Susie’s roommate suddenly passes on, leaving her to deliver an obscene but heartfelt eulogy in front of the few folks who’ve bothered to show up to pay tribute. And also in front of those others—from the well-attended funeral next door –who get roped into listening to her memories of a man they didn’t know, and probably wouldn’t have liked.

 But my heart really went out in this episode to the redoubtable Abe Weissman (played with panache, as always, by Tony Shalhoub), the paterfamilias of this group. Once a respected, if quirky, mathematician with a secure position at Columbia University, he has made a dramatic gesture by casting aside his dignified titles and taking a low-rent job as the drama critic at The Village Voice. Now, enamored of his new role as a spokesperson for the arts, he has bought himself a twirl-worthy black cape so as to make a suitable splash when attending opening nights.

 But disaster awaits. His first theatre gig involves critiquing a new Broadway musical, an updated version of a show that was the annual highlight of the family’s summers at an oh-so-Jewish resort in the Catskills. The entire group snaps up the free tickets that have been lavished upon them, certain that one of their own has now made good on the Great White Way. Uh oh! We don’t see the show itself, but it’s clear from the forced cheerfulness of everyone in the lobby afterwards that this will not be a palpable hit. Abe tries to weasel out of writing a review that will break the playwright’s heart, but professional integrity requires that he call a spade a spade.

 Cut to the following day’s bar mitzvah. Happily, no fun is made of the ancient ceremony itself. But the bar mitzvah boy (with the rabbi’s encouragement) departs from his planned speech to talk pointedly about the essential importance of loyalty. And other congregants loudly chime in, making it clear that Abe’s public diss of a congregant’s labor of love is a profound insult—a disgrace!—to his entire community. Pity the poor critic! He’s paid to be honest, but he’s also expected to be kind. Yet, generally, never the twain shall meet.

 I responded so strongly to this episode because, like every published writer who’s been a commentator or a critic, I often find myself in the awkward position of being asked for feedback on the work of a friend. We writers know what it’s like: a pal or (even worse) a family member hands you the magnum opus on which they’re been laboring for years, saying, “Give me your honest opinion. If you don’t, I won’t respect you ever again.” Translation: a bit of constructive nit-picking is OK, but you’d better make it clear that this is a work of genius.