The primary setting of Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci’s “Big Night” is an Italian restaurant called the Paradise, which, like the movie itself, is small, quiet, and elegant. The restaurant clearly reflects the low-key dignity of its owners, a pair of immigrant brothers named Primo (Tony Shalhoub) and Secondo (Tucci). Primo, the chef, is a shy and rather unworldly culinary perfectionist; he’s mostly content to remain in the kitchen, meticulously re-creating the great cuisine of his homeland, while his suaver, more pragmatic little brother deals with impatient loan officers and placates customers who expect a side of spaghetti and meatballs to accompany Primo’s lovingly seasoned risotto. The upscale urban audiences who patronize low-budget independent pictures like “Big Night” are bound to sympathize with the struggles of Primo and Secondo, whose approach to food preparation is well ahead of its time; the action takes place in the fifties, when the popular image of Italian culture was pretty much exactly represented by a heaping plate of spaghetti and meatballs. The then current stereotype, of exuberant, excessive, mamma-mia Italianness, is embodied by the brothers’ local competitor, Pascal (Ian Holm). His establishment is loud and overdecorated, and the food he serves up symbolizes to Primo “the rape of cuisine”; but Pascal’s is packed every night, while the Paradise, just down the street, clings to its purity and generally ends up closing early.
It isn’t difficult to see that “Big Night” is essentially a fable of art versus commerce. Stanley Tucci also wrote the screenplay (in collaboration with his cousin Joseph Tropiano), and has shaped the story into something that functions as both a demonstration and a vindication of the sort of subtle, finely detailed character acting that he and Tony Shalhoub have practiced in relative obscurity throughout their careers. Although both these wonderful actors have appeared in several movies—once together, in the underrated Bill Murray comedy “Quick Change” (1990)—their most substantial roles have come in series television: Tucci in “Wiseguy” and “Murder One” (in which he played the sinister smoothie Richard Cross), and Shalhoub in the sitcom “Wings” (he’s the lonely, fatalistic Italian cabbie, Antonio). The chief pleasure of “Big Night” is watching these two expert miniaturists in starring roles: they seem to be challenging themselves—and each other—to create large characters without sacrificing the deft, precise craftsmanship that they would apply to more modest parts. They pull it off beautifully, and their graceful work together appears to inspire their fellow-performers. The cast of “Big Night” is obviously a happy, relaxed ensemble; this is actors’ Paradise.
Published in the print edition of the September 23, 1996, issue.
And, thankfully, “Big Night” manages to avoid the independent-movie trap of being too pure and noble for its own good. Early in the picture, Primo, after dismissing his brother’s hesitantly offered suggestion of a minor change in the menu, advocates an idealistic approach to attracting customers—“If you give people time, they learn”—and Secondo, through clenched teeth, responds, “This is a restaurant, not a fucking school.” “Big Night” sanely balances the brothers’ contradictory (and equally valid) philosophies: it takes its time, allowing us to adjust our Hollywood-coarsened sensibilities to its leisurely rhythm and understated humor, but it never forgets that it’s a movie, not a school. Although the picture is dedicated to the principle of tiny, delicate, scrupulously crafted aesthetic pleasures, the filmmakers have the good sense to lay out plenty of them for us to sample. “Big Night” surrounds Primo and Secondo with a vivid gallery of characters. Ian Holm’s Pascal is a brilliant comic portrait of a man whose vulgarity is both instinctive and cunningly calculated; this is the juiciest screen role Holm has had in years, and he sinks his teeth into it greedily. Isabella Rossellini, as Pascal’s unfaithful mistress, Gabriella, is languid, sultry, and surprisingly funny (she should do comedy more often); Campbell Scott contributes a swift, hilarious turn as a fast-talking Cadillac salesman; and Minnie Driver and Allison Janney, as the brothers’ sort-of girlfriends, serve quite nicely as their characters stand and wait. And the movie rewards its characters by bringing them all together for a gustatory blowout at the Paradise—a special dinner that represents the brothers’ last chance to save the restaurant. The guest of honor is to be the popular singer-bandleader Louis Prima; his endorsement, the brothers hope, will give the business the boost it needs.
By the time the lavish dinner has begun, about halfway through, you may already suspect that the movie’s title will prove to be ironic; it’s apparent that, in this picture’s world, “big” is hardly an indication of value. Even while you’re rooting for Primo and Secondo to bring off their public-relations coup, you sense that this sort of self-consciously “important” event isn’t really their style. (The deepest irony of the situation is that the stage persona of the man they’re trying to impress, Louis Prima, trades on cliché images of Italians as swarthy, bouncy, bellowing exhibitionists. Prima—described by one character, charitably, as “boisterous”—is Italian in all the ways that Primo and Secondo, to their financial misfortune, are not.) The big night doesn’t work out as the brothers planned, but it also doesn’t go wrong in quite the manner that the viewer expects. Instead of ruining Primo and Secondo’s evening with slapstick mishaps, “Big Night” stages a party in which everything that matters—that is, the food and the social atmosphere—is idyllically right, and only the larger intentions go unsatisfied.
The soup-to-nuts spread that Primo and Secondo lay out for their lucky guests looks marvellous, and, unlike the haute-cuisine banquet of “Babette’s Feast,” this food is clearly meant to be eaten rather than genuflected to. The party scene is a fitting climax to the movie’s patient accumulation of savory and blissfully pointless delights, a convincing illustration of how keen pleasure for pleasure’s sake can be. And Tucci and Shalhoub use this extravagant set piece to put the finishing touches on their performances. Tucci, whirling through the restaurant’s uncharacteristically crowded dining room, miraculously combines a born host’s easy charm with a bad businessman’s unnerving eagerness to please; his manner tells us all we need to know about Secondo’s restless spirit. Although for most of “Big Night” Secondo appears to be more comfortable in America than Primo does, by the end of the movie we realize that the older brother is fundamentally the happier of the two. Shalhoub is one of the few actors who could make us understand the innocence of an obsessive artist like Primo and make us laugh at it, too. One of Shalhoub’s best effects is a sort of slow blink before he delivers a line; his eyes remain closed just a beat or two longer than they should, as if he were hoping that the world outside would just go away, and when they open again, reluctantly, he looks terribly disappointed. It’s an actor’s trick (he uses it frequently on “Wings”), but in this picture it seems something more: a lovely comic expression of an artist’s childlike willfulness and self-absorption. In the banquet scene, though, his eyes remain open, and, for once, he appears to like what he sees. As the diners dig into his glorious food, their eyes keep closing—partly, perhaps, in homage to the chef, but mostly in uncomplicated rapture.
Akira Kurosawa said of “Yojimbo,” his 1961 samurai action comedy, “The story is so ideally interesting that it’s surprising no one else ever thought of it. The idea is about rivalry on both sides, and both sides are equally bad.” The hero, a mysterious loner, resolves the standoff by shuttling between the competing factions and deliberately provoking a war—a bloodbath that neatly eliminates both groups of thugs. This is, in fact, such a good story that someone had thought of it before Kurosawa: Dashiell Hammett, whose classic 1929 novel “Red Harvest” traces the ingenious manipulations of a nameless detective as he leads dozens of gangsters and corrupt politicians to what amounts to a mass suicide. Three years after “Yojimbo,” Sergio Leone borrowed this satisfying plot structure for a Western: “A Fistful of Dollars,” with Clint Eastwood as a cigarillo-chomping gunslinger-provocateur. Walter Hill’s new film, “Last Man Standing,” is ostensibly a remake of “Yojimbo” (the credits acknowledge that Hill’s screenplay is “based on the story by Ryuzo Kikushima and Akira Kurosawa”), but this treatment, ambitiously, tries to evoke elements of the other famous versions of the story as well. The action takes place in a tiny Texas border town during Prohibition—that is, in Leone’s landscape and in Hammett’s time period. Hill is smart enough not to imitate the styles of any of his predecessors; like the hero, who calls himself John Smith (Bruce Willis), he struggles mightily to hang on to his independence. But the filmmaker pays a price: the only vantage point he can find to make this material look fresh turns out to be someplace lofty and remote—too far above the fray.
In Hill’s fascinating, up-and-down career, most of the box-office hits have been fast-paced urban thrillers (“The Warriors,” “48 Hrs.”) and several of the commercial disappointments have been elegiac Westerns (“The Long Riders,” “Geronimo: An American Legend,” “Wild Bill”). It’s a matter of taste, but the neglected films of the latter group may be his best, and Hill is undoubtedly frustrated that so few people have seen them; the oddly overdeliberate style of “Last Man Standing” may represent his attempt to showcase his more serious manner to the potentially large audience for a Bruce Willis tough-guy vehicle. The picture is impressively shot and edited, but the technique feels wrong for the story: “Last Man Standing” transforms what should be a speedy, bloody tall tale about an amoral prankster into one of those archetype-heavy action sagas that lumber from mythic tableau to mythic tableau and never generate much excitement. The movie takes itself too seriously to recognize even a trace of humor in the spectacle of vermin in fedoras and double-breasted suits bumping one another off. And John Smith’s grim omnipotence is a poor substitute for the down-and-dirty shrewdness that enabled the heroes of “Yojimbo,” “Red Harvest,” and “A Fistful of Dollars” to survive the carnage they created. The trouble with archetypes is that they’re predestined to survive: Smith is the last man standing only because, like the movie itself, he seems to have been standing still all along. ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the show “Wiseguy.”
