These are not easy times we are living in, and it’s fair if that calls us towards easy viewing. While plenty have taken the homeopathic route – fighting the threat or reality of infection with watches of Contagion or Outbreak – there are many friends who have gone allopathic, finding comfort in either the distantly bizarre (Tiger King), the analgesically stupid (Too Hot to Handle) or the pep infused (Brooklyn 99).
More than anything, I would hazard people are doing more rewatching than anything. There is vulnerability in embracing something new, just as there is certainty in what has been experienced before. We talk a lot about the vulnerability of artists presenting their work to a public who might trample or misunderstand their intimacies, but there is also a vulnerability in audiences receiving it. Look at the severity of an audience’s reaction when an ending goes against expectation. Screenwriting gurus talk about investment, but a more accurate way to describe it is an invitation, and nobody wants the dinner guest who starts propositioning your mother-in-law.
So, over the next four newsletters, I’m going to be writing about films that I find comforting (and are relatively easily available for streaming). Not just because other people probably aren’t spending their time pondering Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or the world-alteringly grim First Reformed (at least I saved you the writing on that one!), but also because what is ‘watchable’, ‘entertaining’ or ‘comforting’ bear more investigation than we usually offer it. We claim as self-evident what in fact is elusive: ‘entertainment’ is not so easily quantifiable (if it were, creating blockbusters would be much less of a haphazard enterprise).
Big Night (1996; available to watch on Netflix here and to rent on Youtube here) pleads its place in the pantheon of comfort watching on two highly connected, universal themes: the trials and joys of family life and the trials and joys of food and its preparation. Moreover, it’s also a film about the food that a majority of Americans agree is their most comforting: Italian-American cuisine. More accurately, it’s a story about how Italian cuisine became Italian-American cuisine, as a metaphor for how Italians become Italian-American. The distinction is laid out by successful restaurateur Pascal (Ian Holm), as he schools Secondo (co-writer and co-director Stanley Tucci) on why their restaurant, whose cuisine is a traditionalist transplant from Calabria, is a failure compared to his own roaring trade in spaghetti with meatballs and veal parm.
A guy goes out to eat in the evening after a long day in the office, whatever. Right. He don't want on his plate something that he has to look and think, "What the fuck is this?" You know? What he want is a steak. This is a steak. I like steak, you know? I'm happy. You see what I mean?... Give to people what they want. Then, later, you can give them what you want.
With only slight adaptation, this is a conversation between a producer and a filmmaker: give people a conventional flavour they recognise and have enjoyed before, not the dish you think they should enjoy. While Secondo recognises this, he is hamstrung by his chef, his older brother Primo (Tony Shalhoub), whose precision and purity leaves him ready to throw pans when someone requests spaghetti with their risotto. With 1950s New Jersey diners unprepared for a side of education with their penne, Secondo is shielding his brother from their imminent bankruptcy. Hope (and audience-friendly narrative high stakes) arrive when Pascal offers them a chance to cook for jazz star Louis Prima and to condense the realisation of the American Dream into one meal.
Big Night is not a film about the immigrant struggle recalled fondly from the mount of success (Kazan’s America, America or, more complexly, The Godfather), but as it was navigated day by day: as a painful, lonely, contingent experience that could be rescinded at any moment. Primo is fielding phone calls from back home, as a relative offers them both jobs in a new restaurant in Rome. Meanwhile Secondo has suppressed an offer for the brothers to join Pascal’s empire. Along these polarities – humiliating assimilation or ignominious return – they are forced to walk their own path, not even comforted by mutual struggle. Uncertainty, the burden of choice: these are hard to bear. Tucci and his co-director (and co-star) Campbell Scott do well to lean hard on the performances, the comedy and the inherent joy of eating, because they do not shy away from the real stakes of the situation they are facing.
Pascal gives them an object lesson in the American values they seemingly must adopt to survive. As Secondo complains that life has become ‘too much’, Pascal exclaims ‘There is no too much. There is only not enough. Bite your teeth into the ass of life.’ One of the hallmarks of Italian-American cuisine is leaning harder on meat portions than its progenitor, made ready for a newly affluent and protein-hungry American public. It wasn’t until the late ‘80s and ‘90s that the fanatical, ingredient-obsessed Italian cuisine became de rigueur in the United States, able to openly remember its traditions after the drama of assimilation was complete. Pascal’s restaurant (introduced in a long shot reminiscent of Goodfella’s Copacabana entrance by way of the Seventh Circle of Hell) serves up a maximalist den of iniquity – sending bottles of champagne to Humphrey Bogart here, serving up the drama of a flambéd dessert there – but more importantly to his success in America, he is adaptable. In his Janus-faced farewell to his brothers, his parting shot runs, ‘I'm a businessman. I'm anything I need to be, at any time.’ For those unwilling to bend and add cheese to a fish dish, America is full only of painful dilutions rather than opportunities to adapt and survive. Too late the brothers realise that Pascal is also serving them another lesson in American values: savage competition. As Primo wails in appropriately culinary terror, ‘This place is eating us alive!’ As much as this is a film about assimilation, it takes great pleasure in accent (‘There’s an accidental poetry by people speaking English with different accents.’) and difference, generating meaning from when the brothers elect to return to speaking in Italian. Even the fact that the Italian characters are played by an Arab, an Englishman, a Puerto Rican and an Italian-American ends up speaking volumes about America’s porousness.
Much of the comedy in Big Night derives from the same love/hate relationships of most sitcoms: people of opposing mentalities forced to share the same space. Primo and Secondo lives are tightly circumscribed by those who work in the restaurant and the small coterie of local Italian immigrants. When Secondo starts an affair with Pascal’s wife (a small but memorable role for Isabella Rossellini), we suspect it may be less in pursuit of lust than in service of having separation and secrets from his brother. Written by Tucci and his cousin Joseph Tropiano, it’s a film that deeply understands the intimacies and silences that arise in families. For people currently isolating with their relations, it may prove a shade too close to home. Those who know us best also have the ability to tug at our deepest insecurities with the lightest of questions: does this need salt? Do we really want to chop the garlic like that? Segundo and Primo are both victims and benefactors of the exchange that both the best and worst partnerships are formed of: complementary skills. Where Secondo understands finance and flair, Primo understands flavour and finesse. Rather than compensating for each other, they feel bridled by infringing on their principles. Asked by Secondo to remove the expensive, laborious risotto that patrons pick at, Primo feigns acquiescence to his brother’s capitulation to American tastes, agreeing that perhaps, ‘Maybe instead… we could add… what do they call it… it’s a hot… dog. Hot dogs. I think that people would like that.’ When the truths start flying in the film’s final chapter, they are the explosive overboiling of a pot that has been on the stove for 90 minutes prior, but also ever since they shared a playroom.
What I’ve said of the film so far doesn’t seem assured comfort watching (come for the grinding pain of the immigrant experience, stay for the familial sniping!). And perhaps it’s not. It’s realist’s comfort watching: Big Night doesn’t promise that pain can be avoided, but pleasure can sit with it, side-by-side and with ample consolations. Fittingly for a film about food, it’s about momentary pleasures that pass over the tongue and disappear forever. It extends that argument to a ride in a beautiful new car, a roll in the hay, two shots too many of grappa, two girlfriends, a dance and a song. There are many moments of quiet observation where we can share in those moments that make the pain – of travelling around the world to taste success, of chopping for hours, of strained arguments – worthwhile. The film’s famous final scene, which it is no spoiler to say features someone making scrambled eggs from start to finish is an affirmation of simplicity, the joy and freedom offered by doing rather than thinking or talking. ‘I love the theatricality of restaurants,’ said Tucci at the time, and his preparations for opening hours are as enjoyable as watching an actor don their wig and greasepaint before curtain call.
Despite Stanley Tucci’s late career blooming, Big Night is not a film that is highly vaunted, but one that – when prompted – people have fond memories of. This is neither fast food, nor haute cuisine: a popular film that goes down too easily to shake much critical hand-wringing, and not connected to a director’s career, nor a franchise. If it’s mentioned, it’s part of the surprisingly small canon of food films (where even something as middling as Chef invites a passionate cult). It’s like a neighbourhood restaurant that never gets reviewed beyond Yelp, but nonetheless that you and your partner love and are devastated when it shuts down. Somewhere you can go for something nourishing, where you can recentre yourself without even realising, where connections are made and deepened. It’s no replacement for the real thing, which we’re all missing right now, but it’s a placebo with plenty to recommend it.
Recommendations
If you want to understand the deep divisions in Italian and Italian-American cuisine, reading this anniversary interview with the cast and contrasting Tucci and Isabella Rosellini’s answers (and those the Signorina declines to answer) is an excellent guide to the hauteur.
Of course, 90 minutes is more time than we have for self-soothing. I’d like to recommend you point yourself towards this gospel version of the Golden Girls theme tune that I have used as a single pill dosage pick me up for years. Send me your stupid-genius Youtube video in return.
Jules Dassin’s Uptightis a genuine curio: a film about a black uprising shot with all the Technicolor flair of West Side Story, but without situating its tale for white America. It’s a mixed bag, but provides small imaginary window on what a more racially fair Hollywood might have produced.
Omelette!!!! Nice article otherwise x