Many a trailer makes a movie look better than it is. The mild, squeezably soft-hearted Mambo Italiano is a rare case of being not nearly as excruciating as its trailer suggests.
The movie about Italian Montrealers is wacky and broad as a barn to begin with. So it looks cringemaking to distil its slapdashery into a couple of minutes (stuffing all the head-slapping incidents into a few nasty seconds, for example). But the trailer was clearly tailored to sell Mambo Italiano as My Big Fat Italian Wedding. Which, thankfully, it isn't.
This isn't to absolve this adaptation of Steve Galluccio's crowd-pandering play of its excesses. Some in the community will tell you that a depiction of Italian-Canadians full of endless shouting and head-slapping is essentially accurate. Whatever, it's still something to get over before you accept the characters as human beings.
And it's a testament to the calibre of the cast -- including Paul Sorvino, Mary Walsh and Ginette Reno as big, fat loud Italian parents and the talented Luke Kirby as the scandalous gay son Angelo -- that there are indeed souls under all the noise.
Played by Kirby with the tremulousness and humour of a young Matthew Broderick, Angelo is itching to come out of the closet in just about every way -- as a writer, a gay and as an adult (bucking the notion that Italian boys should live with their parents until they're ready to marry). When he decides to drop the bomb that his "roommate" Nino (Peter Miller) is really his lover, all predictable, good-natured hell breaks loose.
Angelo's parents Maria and Gino (Reno and Sorvino) are straightforwardly angry. But Nino's widowed mom Lina (played blusteringly by Walsh with an Italian accent by way of Newfoundland) deflects the blame to Angelo and is delighted when Nino finds his way to the tender embrace of big-haired Pina (Sophie Lorain).
But the most affecting portrayal is arguably Angelo's neurotic sister Anna (Claudia Ferri), whose trampy exploits and musical-chairs with psychiatrists are manifestations of a spirit in the process of being crushed. Strangely, she seems a voice of wisdom and the least cartoonish character in the movie.
The cartoonishness, however, is embraced by director Emile Gaudreault, whose approach -- typical of French comedies -- leans to quick cuts and punchy visual gags.
Despite the subject matter, and the rating, this is pretty much a family film. Even in anger and shock, there is barely a nasty word said about gays (the odd "fag" but no distinctively Italian slurs spat out), which is not my experience of Old World attitudes.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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