The ingredients are simple, the cooking process without haste and the history rich. The Italian dishes honored in the sentimental dramatic of director Stephen Chbosky “Nonnas” do not come from professionally trained chiefs, but women of Italian inheritance whose flavors were perfected during the generations. Each fork carries a delicious tribute to their arrival and to the people who loved them. And some components of the film are indeed authentic: the script of Liz Maccie offers a vision of fiction on the way Jody Scaravella opened Enoteca Maria, a real Italian restaurant where grandmothers cooked.
The MTA worker, Joe (Vince Vaughn), has just lost his mother. The opening sequence shows him as a child observing while his mother and “nonna” (or grandmother) cook a feast for friends and family. These halie days appear soaked in ethereal lighting to transmit nostalgia. In the present, when everyone has left the funeral, it is the dishes they have prepared for him that remain like edible manifestations of their affection. However, the Sunday sauce of its Nonna is the taste that is most lacking, such a specific flavor that it seems irreplicable without the real recipe. It takes a long time in Joe to proclaim the idea that cooking is an expression of love, the central theme not so original of the often saccharin and occasionally touching history.
And when his Pall Bruno for Life (Joe Manganiello) and his wife Stella (Drea de Matteo) suggest that he uses his mother’s insurance to make a change in his life, Joe enrolls a quartet of non-nas to be the chefs of a new restaurant which he plans to open on Staten Island: Enoteca Maria, in honor of the women of his family. There is Roberta (Lorraine Bracco), his mother’s best Bolognese friend. An announcement of Craigslist brings the former nun Teresa (Talia Shire) and Antonella (Brenda Vaccaro), a Sicilian without frills. As for the desserts, Joe convinces the hairdresser of his mother Gia (Susan Sarandon) to lend his talents to the company.
The cast of these women is in itself a celebration of Italian-American culture, because some of them appeared in several of the most notable films and programs centered this specific ethnic community: Bracco played in “Goodfellas” and “The Sopranos”, while Shire played in “The Godfather” and the films “Rocky”. With Antonella comes his neighbor Olivia (Linda Cardellini), who was the darling of Joe’s high school, to wrap the plot more with a romantic thread that appears to be inserted with force to give the character of Vaughn a secondary motivation, but without imagination, in addition to his sincere devotion for her mother.
Although Vaughn’s dialogue everywhere with platitudes, the sincerity of the actor’s daily life maintains the lines as anchored as possible. One believes it as a medium blue necklace housing a soft heart inside an imposing silhouette. Elsewhere, MacCie’s scenario feels designed to integrate all the loose sub -intrigues into an abnormally well tidy set at the end, including a letter that Joe’s mother left for him, and the idea that the inhabitants of Staten Island could be unhappy with a stranger opening a restaurant there. The test is coated almost from start to finish with classic Italian songs, as well as English songs that talk about the experience of immigrants in New York.
“Nonnas” finds its richest moments when experienced actresses share the screen to bicker on the specific regions in Italy, they consider their homeland or to contemplate their past mistakes. Sarandon is delighted with a tailor-made role as more elegant and avant-garde in the group. The fact that his character has a hair salon comes into play during a scene where non-nas get a makeover while drinking lemoncello and leading to their dead husbands, lovers who fled or the traps of children’s education. Their candid jokes make the film wish to be up to its title and make the protagonists, similar to the way “Tea With The Dames” or the most recent “80 for Brady” has made their main ladies for their main ladies.
As a film focused on food, “Nonnas” has luscious and appetizing close -ups of sauces, soups and meats that the seasoned cooks combined, but do not engage much with their origin or their meaning in a large cultural or historical context. The use of food not as a main dish but as a vehicle to explore family ties here recalls the tone and the ideas of the “tortilla soup” of María Ripoll, on an American Mexican chef and his three daughters. “Nonnas” makes the house on several occasions on the unifying force of a homemade meal as an incarnation of the community, and even if it overloads its narrative pot with too many unnecessary condiments which are lost in the mixture, the result is ultimately pleasant to taste.
