GANGSTA匪徒

Before cinching his immortal cachet with hefty THE SILENCE OF THE LAMB (1991), and PHILADELPHIA (1993), Jonathan Demme has made a name as a capable humorist, MARRIED TO THE MOB is a knowingly gleesome parody of the gangster picture that is perceived as the shorthand of American cinema’s high-water mark, post-GODFATHER (1972) and its sequel.

When rising Mafioso Frank de Marco (a prime-time dreamboat Alec Baldwin) is iced during a romantic assignation, and audience is granted in the know of who is the murderer, his wife Angela (Pfeiffer), who has already been guilt-ridden and careworn toward her husband’s life-on-the-line business and its ill-gotten lucres, instantly ups sticks in a tenement apartment with her young son and tries to start anew.

But Angela is persistently coveted by Frank’s boss Tony “The Tiger” Russo (Stockwell), on top of that he has a ballbuster wife in the person of Connie (Ruehl), while Angela clumsily parries off Tony, she sets her cap at a neighbor plumber in the apartment building, Mike Downey (Modine), unbeknownst to her, who is indeed an undercover FBI agent, stakes her out with the intention to nail Tony for his seedy goings-on, but who can say no to a creature like Angela?

Spiked with haphazard, slo-mo shoot-‘em-up set pieces where no blood is allowed to spurt onto the screen, MARRIED TO THE MOB is at its most charming when comically toys with Angela’s plight and lets Pfeiffer shine with her unrivaled gorgeousness viscerally tinted with angst and yearning, fully elicits her seriocomic bent that no ’80s-bad hairdo can blot out, and in the result, Modine is mostly sidelined as an innocuous doll, his Mike might never be emotionally mature enough for Angela a posteriori, yet, on screen, they are merely adorable together.

Among its secondary players, a pistol-wielding Ruehl has a whale of a time attempting to castrate her two-timed hubby, also gets to deliver sideswipes like “that bitch thinks her shit doesn’t smell”, not at all a positive example of distaff solidarity, but if it plays for laughter, it gets by.

However, the real humdinger of the movie is doubtlessly, the seasoned Stockwell, awarded with his hitherto only Oscar nomination, on paper, it looks like a citation for his lengthy career (he has been acting since 1945!), but Stockwell certainly keeps audience spellbound with Tony’s “cool as a cucumber” suaveness, “quick on the draw” panache, his wandering gestures and pussified reactions, one simply feels delightful that, for once, a high-wire comedic performance is being recognized by the Academy whose go-to options are drama elitists. Playing fire with danger, and then putting on a straight face when one’s laughter line start to quiver, that’s none-so-secret recipe of Demme’s mob comedy.

referential entries: Demme’s SOMETHING WILD (1986, 5.2/10); Émile Gaudreault’s MAMBO ITALIANO (2003, 5.4/10).