‘Spirited and sumptuous’: why Big Night is my feelgood movie

4 hours ago 3

“Life is meals,” observed the novelist James Salter. Big Night, Stanley Tucci’s spirited and sumptuous indie from 1996, is a film about one big meal that asks a few big questions about life, including: What is the cost of the American dream? What does food allow us to say to each other that words can’t? And what right does Marc Anthony, of all people, have to deliver one of the most charming non-speaking performances in any movie since the silent era?

Big Night follows two Italian immigrants who run a failing restaurant in 1950s New Jersey. Ambitious, high-strung Secondo (Tucci, practically hirsute) is the manager, while his brother Primo (Tony Shalhoub) is the madman in the kitchen, a purist who derides the local clientele as philistines and has begun to doubt the wisdom of coming to the US in the first place.

A last-ditch opportunity to save the business arrives unexpectedly through the largesse of Pascal (Ian Holm), proprietor of a successful competing restaurant down the street, who seems to have it all figured out in this country (“Bite your teeth into the ass of life!” he exhorts Tucci’s Secondo). Pascal wants to help the brothers – they are no threat to him – and so he arranges for them to host a dinner for the touring jazz star Louis Prima and his band. Secondo and Primo will be made men, if they can pull it off.

At this point in the film, we are all clocked in and a day’s work lies ahead. There are preparations to be made, ingredients to procure. And there is a guest list to be finalized and then worried over, a magnificent supporting cast that includes Secondo’s sweetheart (Minnie Driver); his lover (Isabella Rossellini), who is also Pascal’s sweetheart; and Primo’s crush, a neighborhood florist (Allison Janney) who is more game for the evening than Primo realizes. All along, passing through the restaurant like an ethereal hipster out of Jim Jarmusch, is the brothers’ near-silent helper Cristiano (Anthony), without whom, somehow, the whole movie would not work.

The camera’s attention to food in Big Night may be its greatest pleasure and greatest insight. We are invited to watch the penne rolled by hand and the red sauce ladled with tenderness. This hungry cinematography anticipates so much about the way we’ve come to look at food on screen, from documentaries including David Gelb’s Chef’s Table series to the award-winning show The Bear.

Unlike a lot of The Bear, though, or other comedies that turn on a high-stakes dinner (Mrs Doubtfire and The Birdcage, for example), Big Night doesn’t yield over much to anxious tension on the one hand or madcap hijinks on the other. This, to me, is what makes it feel so good. There are real stakes to this meal for these characters, but co-directors Tucci and Campbell Scott care enormously that you have a good time at their party. They never want you to refill your own glass.

Take the sequence in the middle of the film in which Secondo, under the influence of a smooth car salesman named Bob (Scott) with a plaster cast on his hand, test-drives a Cadillac he will buy with money he doesn’t have. It’s hardly necessary to the plot but a perfect aperitif, this dudes-rock intermezzo with two joy-riders who are also the directors of the movie you are watching. When Secondo asks him how he got the cast, Bob replies: “No idea.” Ma che importa – who cares? Later, once the records are spinning and the dancing starts, you recognize in time with the characters that the guest of honor isn’t required for this party to be a success.

The long take that ends the film, in the kitchen the morning after, shouldn’t be over-described for readers who haven’t seen it. Suffice to say, it is a key exhibit in the archaeology of Tucci’s second act as an ambassador of Italian food, which began in earnest during lockdown with an Instagram video of him making a negroni – a shameless, filthy bit of pornography, the internet decided. Sex appeal aside, Tucci, with Scott and his co-writer, Joseph Tropiano, intuited something essential in Big Night about our appetite for food served on the big screen.

More than that, he recognized how eager we are for entertainment that understands the importance of food in structuring and texturing the course of our lives. Isn’t a good meal, especially a simple one, all you want after a long day and a big night? If life is meals, play on.