I Would Like to See It: Big Night

The first time we really see Primo (Tony Shalhoub) cook, directors Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott shoot it with a pure and unrestrained but deeply skilled and disciplined joy, following the brisk whisking together of flour and egg and water, the play of fingers over glistening dough, the brushing and cutting and rolling of pasta; in the span of a few seconds the film builds a visual language of textures and motions from which tactile pleasure blooms organically. Primo is a genius, and Tucci and Campbell trust their audience to see this in the way he approaches his art, to perceive in the preparation, cooking, and serving of food an entire personality. Big Night features moments of corniness, yes, and has its fair share of slippery accents, but its appreciation of cooking as a craft and its surprisingly raw insight into capitalism’s incompatibility with beauty and joy allow it to overcome these minor shortfalls.

The tension between Primo’s unwillingness to compromise his cuisine and his brother Secondo’s (Stanley Tucci) desperation for success grows quickly past its simple Odd Couple appeal, digging into how one’s relationship to art can shape both behavior and worldview. As their restaurant, Paradise, struggles and their fellow Italian immigrant and restaurateur Pascal (Ian Holm) makes overtures to take them on at his prestigious but mediocre restaurant, the brothers must confront the American Dream in the cold light of day. “This place is eating us alive,” shouts Primo during a climactic argument with his brother. America, at its core, demands capitulation to mediocrity in exchange for success as an artist. You have to stop serving your seafood risotto, have to put meatballs on your spaghetti and pare back the flavors of your herbs, your sauces; in short, you must do every dull and joyless thing Americans expect when they go out to eat.

For Primo, the choice is easy. He cannot and will not. The film instead follows the much more complex and unconventional story of Secondo believing he would and then discovering, when up against the wire, that there are things he values more than money and prestige. There is no triumphant saving of the restaurant, no financial windfall to let us know that good guys get rewarded for hard work, and no pat lesson about the importance of compromise. Instead, the film shows us a dream collapse, a relationship fail, and a man learn something vital about himself as his life crashes into rock bottom. It’s the The Third Man of restaurant movies, its happy ending walking past us into reality. Only the art endures, the food which in a burst of joy and diligent craft we watch unfold into being, which first separates the brothers and then, as their lives diverge, ties them together one last time.