Beyond the Multiplex

Gandolfini sings! Sarandon dances! John Turturro's musical "Romance & Cigarettes" is the most original movie you won't see this year. Plus: Moonwalks, gay Israelis and more.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

Susan Sarandon in "Romance and Cigarettes."

Sept. 6, 2007 | I almost don't want to know what combination of malice, whimsy, stupidity and greed has led to the fate of John Turturro's musical "Romance & Cigarettes," which is scheduled to open in New York this week -- but not currently scheduled to play anywhere else in North America. It premiered in 2005 at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, and since then has played all over Europe. It's played before Finnish, Greek, Israeli, Turkish and Hungarian audiences, but United Artists apparently believes that Americans outside Manhattan are too dumb to appreciate it.

I suppose the film has "marketing issues." It's a peculiar blend of baroque fantasy and working-class realism; it veers from erotic farce to wrenching domestic drama and back again; it's a musical comedy without a conventional happy ending; it's a love story about the most difficult kind of love, between two people who've been together almost forever and hurt each other almost irreparably. But all those things are also what make "Romance & Cigarettes" so great. It's the most original picture by an American director I've seen this year, and also the most delightful.

When the movie's protagonist, a softhearted, skirt-chasing New York bridge maintenance worker named Nick Murder (played by James Gandolfini, who apparently is well known for some TV show), comes out of his Queens bungalow for a smoke, after a fight with his wife, at first he just stands there staring into the middle distance, like guys all over the world throughout eternity. Then he comes down off the porch, twirls around a streetlight with surprising grace, and starts to sing along with Engelbert Humperdinck's "A Man Without Love." Accompanied by a chorus of singing and dancing sanitation workers, kids on bicycles and random passersby.

It's one of the most exhilarating moments in recent American cinema, and "Romance & Cigarettes" is loaded with them. Susan Sarandon, who plays Nick's long-suffering wife, performs her own dynamite singalong version of Dusty Springfield's "Piece of My Heart" (along with a church choir led by Eddie Izzard). Christopher Walken, as her Elvis-worshiping cousin, performs an all-singing, all-dancing dramatization of Tom Jones' infidelity-and-murder saga "Delilah" that compresses the over-amped pathos of a Puccini opera into three minutes. And don't get me started on Kate Winslet's performance as the foulmouthed, oversexed lingerie-shop girl who threatens to wreck the Murder marriage.

There's more hilarity, more sense of risk and more sheer filmmaking joy in "Romance & Cigarettes" than in roughly the last 157 indie pictures I've sat through. One way or another, Turturro's picture will make its own reputation, as eccentric works of genius always do. Some viewers will be thrilled, as I was, and I'm sure others will find its combination of sweetness and acidity bewildering. (For a double bill of semi-experimental musicals, combine "Romance & Cigarettes" with Francis Ford Coppola's 1982 "One From the Heart.") But however you find this remarkable film, you're not too likely to find it at a theater near you.

A happier fate awaits "In the Shadow of the Moon," which may well be the most exciting documentary of the year so far. I guess it took a British director, David Sington, to capture the story of the dozen American men who walked on the moon -- the only human beings in our species history yet to visit another celestial body. It's a mesmerizing and emotional film, and the moonwalkers turn out to be a wry, reflective and self-aware bunch, many of whom experienced their otherworldly voyage as a transcendent, life-changing event.

There are too many other films this week (and next) to cover in detail, as the autumnal deluge arrives. Quick notes follow on novelist-writer-director Paul Auster's "Inner Life of Martin Frost," Israeli hipster Eytan Fox's "The Bubble," and the rerelease of William Friedkin's legendary leather-bar odyssey "Cruising."

Next page: Turturro: "You can mine the humor out of something horrible"