Married to the Mob (1988)
Jonathan Demme said, if I recall, that the intention of his The Truth About Charlie was to remake Charade in the vein of the French New Wave, which had reached full bloom at around the time of the original Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn film’s release. That is a fine idea, only sporadically successful at best (though I confess to not remembering the picture too well) but the real problem with Charlie may have been that Demme had already made his French New Wave pictures. Something Wild, a tonally disorienting tight-rope walk of a screwball comedy punctuated with violence that counts, plays like an American approximation of some of the French New Wave’s experiments with genre flexibility. Married to the Mob, while lacking a bit of the classic Something Wild’s pulse, is of the same key, and underappreciated.
There are few things more exhilarating in the movies than a picture impressing us with its creator’s amusement. I don’t mean glib post-modernism. I mean, as with some of Joe Dante’s pictures, a film that projects a sense of a talented, assured movie-maker recognizing the clichés and limitations of certain genres and casting them aside like the shackles they are, and racing for the moon of his id instead. If we had to continue to belabor the French New Wave comparison, Demme would probably be most in line with Truffaut, a director with an encyclopedic knowledge and love of movies who also happens to be a major humanist.
Something Wild is certainly a major film, a nearly peerless working of a good-bad-rowdy-party-boy-wish-fulfillment tone with three classic performances. Married to the Mob isn’t as much of a surprise; the most obvious reason being that Something Wild came first, so we were on to what Demme was up to by this point. Married to the Mob is also broader than Something Wild, riffing, as the title suggests, on the familiar Italian sitcom clichés. The broadness is part of the joke though-part of the picture’s absurdist surreality; and Demme is always aware of what his story could possibly devolve into. The redemptive factor of Married to the Mob is that it is legitimately gonzo kooky, a flakey comedy thriller that, occasionally, suggests the irreverent screwball wit and spirit of a picture that you might watch during the day on Turner Classic Movies with Ralph Bellamy or Don Ameche mated with something more undeniably in tune with the me-me-me-1980s.
Married to the Mob opens brilliantly. Two men, dressed in dowdy Wall Street-ish business apparel, wait for someone at a station as the train rolls in. We are consciously led to believe that this third man is a co-worker, a fellow cog in the traditional day to day tedium that is our working stiff lives. This third man, looking a bit like an upright egg on two legs, catches the train at just the right minute, and the two other men board behind him. The train passes through a tunnel, and one of the men shoots the egg man in the back of the head. In a typical bebop tonal corkscrew, an inappropriately romantic-somber song begins to play on the soundtrack-New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle”.
The two men close the egg man’s eyes, wiping a bit of blood away, allowing him to appear to be just another morning traveler, exhausted with ennui, facing the next day of caged banality. The two men, who we can now confidently call hit-men (one of which is played by Alec Baldwin) wonder how anyone can do that to themselves day in day out, squished like sardines. The idiocy/cowardice of the modern working drone is voiced in nearly every crime movie we’ve seen, but it’s a testament to the scary-sad-funny power of this opening, that, for once, you think the hoods just might be on to something.
Demme never plays with his material this masterfully in Married to the Mob again, but there are many pleasures to be had-the first hour in particular radiates that Demme specialty-a hum of life and eccentric good humor that’s propelled by a self-consciously strange, fantastic, throbbing soundtrack. The “plot”, such as it is, doesn’t really intrude until the too busy, not-as-flip-as-it-thinks-it-is climax. The “plot” is an old standby. The Alec Baldwin character, called “Cucumber” Frank de Marco, returns home to his wife, Angela (Michelle Pfeiffer), who is clearly just as exhausted with her lifestyle as the train passengers in the opening moments. Angela is first glimpsed in a hair salon, getting her beautiful-intimidating red-brunette curls touched up (by the always welcome, familiar to Demme, Charles Napier), as the New Order song concludes. Angela’s a heroine with a traditional to the movies problem: she’s a siren oblivious to her powers, clouded by a feeling of claustrophobia. Her obligatory girlfriends hate her, perhaps because they rightly sense that Angela has checked out long ago (and secretly recognize that Angela is much more beautiful).
Something happens, and Angela finds herself getting what she wished for: freedom for herself and her young son from the mafia. The head of this picture’s mob, Tony “The Tiger” Russo (Dean Stockwell), has sexual designs on Angela, of course, and won’t let Angela stay as gone as she’d like. The FBI, represented, primarily, in this picture, by Mike (Mathew Modine) and Oliver Platt, believe Angela to be sleeping with Tony and follow her-hoping to implicate Tony in a murder. Tony’s wife, played by Mercedes Ruehl in the part that most actively courts cliché, is convinced that Tony and Angela are sleeping together too, and follows along as well.
Married to the Mob isn’t as labored as the above would lead you to believe, few Demme pictures are. The picture revels in incidental, possibly ad-libbed, moments of humanity, danger and high comedy: Tony nearly dying because his henchman forgets his onion rings; Platt and Mike’s exchanging of a high-five; Angela and Mike’s meet cute inside of a cramped elevator, with Mike pinned under Angela’s new street bought chair; Angela’s pleading for a job in a hair salon; Angela and Mike’s making out, after spending the platonic night together, the following morning. Angela and Mike don’t kiss in the boringly photogenic fashion of most movies, its full-bodied, hungry, emotionally needy and naked; and considerably more moving.
The performances are on par with Something Wild. Michelle Pfeiffer, having now committed the Hollywood sin of passing her fifth decade of existence on this planet, is now playing villains in films that I’ve mostly skipped. But Pfeiffer, in the 1980s and early 1990s, was one of our very strongest, most beautiful, most vulnerable, most interesting movie stars. Pfeiffer has a gift: otherworldly looks that can still somehow exude a feeling of Earthbound need: she sells you the familiar to the movies pabulum of her needing to be saved by a man without you feeling too guilty about it in the morning. It has something to do with Pfeiffer’s eyes; they’re stunning, but also just a bit bigger than they should be, a little not quite right. It’s fitting that Pfeiffer has worked with Tim Burton in probably the best female performance to grace his oeuvre; as her eyes conjure an image of a crazy Burtonian little girl frying ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass. This wonderful, stylized, broad, movie-powered presence is ideal for a part such as Angela, which is a pure confection of genre anyway. Pfeiffer is a lead actress you feel you could actually successfully buy a drink, and that, in and of itself, would nearly be enough.
Mathew Modine appears to be on a different planet here, and that’s to the picture’s benefit. Modine’s Mike is an oddball, one who clearly also resents his job (the notion of discarding past things runs through the entire picture-though it never intrudes) and finds strange ways of his voicing his malcontent. Mike’s flip, usually intentionally unfunny remarks are occasionally allowed a greater edge than one would expect, and Modine seizes on the character’s wobbly mood swings; his line readings are appealingly helium contemptuous-he gets the manic tone of the entire picture. There’s a moment, mid-way, when Ruehl bursts in on Mike and Angela’s first date, expecting to find Angela with Tony. Ruehl asks Mike whose husband he is, and, Mike, not missing a beat, says, in perfect planet Jupiter-faux-good-humor “I don’t know, whose husband were you looking for?”
And there’s Dean Stockwell, a routinely wonderful character actor (he had the best moment in Blue Velvet, which is saying something). Ray Liotta was the heavy in Something Wild, and it’s among his strongest performances, but Stockwell, in his way, has an even more daunting assignment. Tony, the mafia chief, is the picture’s villain, but he’s also Mob’s comedic poker. The trick is to play the dangerous and the funny without canceling one or the other or both out and winding up with a performance of barely calibrated, miscalculated goo. Stockwell leans on his fey-menacing-macho qualities (Blue Velvet brought this out too) with the invention and dexterity of both a good actor and a natural comedian. Stockwell murders someone early in the picture, and tells them “You disappointed the shit out of me”, this line could’ve been a throwaway, but, in this picture, it’s the throwaways that linger and sting and tickle.
Married to the Mob isn’t without problems. One wishes that Demme had scaled back on the hyperbole of the violence. Something Wild became Something More, because the violence truly intruded on a genre with which it didn’t belong (few films manage this effectively). Married to the Mob never gathers that kind of surprising weight beyond isolated episodes, and it threatens to evaporate altogether before the end credits. The climax is well-staged but unrewarding; Demme not quite managing to totally elude the shackles of the genre after all. But Married to the Mob is still an unruly, loosey-goosey gem, a picture with spark and personality that feels authentically nourishing and good for you in a way that pure entertainments rarely do. And, of course, we lost Demme, as it seems we must usually lose our great filmmakers, to the boring Oscar machine-the ultimate train to conformity. Perhaps someone should stage a spiritual hit, or at least find a way to pipe “Bizarre Love Triangle” into Demme’s office. But that’s only the movies. Nothing in real life seems to trump change, our need in real life to move on from something already perfectly wonderful.
★★★
June 11th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
My friend saw the original cut of this before it was butchered the same way SWING SHIFT was. I think there was more violence. It would be great to see a real director’s cut if these two films…
June 11th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
If you asked me what Silence of the Lambs and Something Wild and Stop Making Sense all had in common, the only thing I would come up with is that they each shared the same director.
I’ve never really felt Jonathan Demme was someone you could put out in front of his movies and discuss; you just have to take each film on its individual merits. Thanks for reminding me Married to the Mob was worth the rental, Chuck.
June 11th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Both Jonathan Demme and his films are under the heading of “Things I ought to like more than I actually do, if practically everyone else is to be trusted.” I’ve given his whole filmography a whirl, and in truth I don’t think he ever made a particularly outstanding film aside from The Silence of the Lambs. I often like the ideas or concepts or vague thematic links between movies but in spite of the best efforts of many a writer, including some of my favorite critics, I just don’t find him very engaging. For some reason I almost hate several of his movies, like Melvin and Howard and his remake of The Manchurian Candidate (well, my hating of that one isn’t so mysterious, to my mind). I like Something Wild and Married to the Mob all right, though. Very good review; you’ve convinced me to try this one out again to see if I like it more.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Try CAGED HEAT and HANDLE WITH CARE.
June 12th, 2008 at 4:15 am
I actually may be doing MELVIN AND HOWARD as next week’s Monday classic, but that’s still being debated. I’m in the “Demme’s an auteur” camp myself, there’s a certain curiosity and humanity that pervades the majority of his work-and I love how he plays with tone. One of his least interesting pictures would be PHILAHDELPHIA, which felt like typical “I just won one Oscar lets try for two” courting to me, and I didn’t buy Hanks at all (friends can tell you though that I detest FORREST GUMP, it used to be a pet rant of mine).
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE remake was good enough (for awhile)to convince me that the idea may not be quite as boneheaded as it sounded, but still not nearly good enough. That film should’ve played faster and looser, and connected more to why we’re remaking this story now (because the story hasn’t changed-that could imbue the whole notion of remakes with an unexpected poignance.) I’ll say it too, Denzel Washington has gotten boring. He’s a star, no doubt, but his coolest guy in the room bit has become naggingly self-serving egotistical. And most of his films suck these days, though no one seems to notice.
Thanks guys, and Christian, I didn’t know that MOB had been messed with too, thanks for the heads up!
June 12th, 2008 at 8:49 am
I haven’t seen this one for a million years. Like Joe, I find it hard to analyze Demme as a whole. I only consider him in the context of whatever movie I’m thinking about. The Stop Making Sense Demme seems like a different person to me than the Silence of the Lambs Demme.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Pointless Celeb Story: I sat next to Denzel at a cafe in LA the day Bush was re-elected (sic). We were both bummed. When the waitress came by, Denzel, asking for more rolls, said, “I know times are tough but…”
June 12th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Caged Heat is amusing, campy fun.
The remake of The Manchurian Candidate missed the mark so badly in part because it lost what made the original so… original. It wasn’t just a thriller. It was a political satire. The icy jab of Frankenheimer’s film was that anti-communist ideologues were in truth the real communists! It was a brilliantly effective satire that, you could say, satirized both sides of the (then) current debate about communist infiltration in America, etceteras.
Demme’s movie loses *all* of that, and is just another boringly earnest “look what this baaad corporation is doing–look at these baaad people!” No kidding.
It’s a shame because it could have been an awesome reimagining.
June 16th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
This is an enjoyable film that basically turned Michelle Pfeiffer into a real star. A shame it’s so forgotten.