Jonah Naplan May 27, 2023
“Mafia Mamma” is an absolutely baffling piece of cinema, if you could even call it that. It’s a film so outright meanspirited, ill-intentioned, and blatantly offensive that it makes you squirm. Movies should not be made like this. They should not affect you this negatively. But director Catherine Hardwicke’s disrespectful mafia picture always finds a way to stab into the sensitive commodities of your soul, twisting the knife deeper and deeper, tighter and tighter, until the light leaves your eyes. Pardon my metaphor, but I did not like this movie.
The stereotypical florid strings of Italian music ring out in a Roman plaza. Dead bodies are strewn across the ground engulfing a fountain. A woman in black stilettos emerges from the carnage. This is Bianca (Monica Bellucci). A man with a wounded arm is running away in the distance. “This means war,” Bellucci spits. The word “Mafia” slides down from the top of the frame, as “Mamma” slides up from the bottom, meeting in the middle. Yet inferior to the trilogy in more ways than I have fingers, the words are in the iconic “Godfather” font. Oh brother.
It is here that the film cuts to suburban, middle-aged Kristin (Toni Collette)—an ordinary helicopter mom who’s lost her aplomb in recent years. Her son Domenick (Tommy Rodger) has gone off to college, her husband Paul (Tim Daish) has proven himself unfaithful, her job marketing beauty pharmaceuticals to cancer patients has made her feel self-effaced, and apparently she hasn’t had sex in three years. She confides in her friend Jenny (Sophia Nomvete) about her lust for coition, and attempts to begin her “Eat, Pray, F**k” arc. The plot kicks into motion when she’s contacted by Bianca, calling her to the funeral of her grandfather in Italy, eventually roping her into a lifeless family feud between her Balbano hierarchy and the Romano mafia.
Most of Collette’s talent is completely wasted on exaggerated facial expressions and exclamations of “Oh no!” or “Oh my god!” Whether she’s accidentally killed someone with hidden cruel intentions, or indulging orgiastically in homemade pasta, it’s all stuff we’ve seen before, but never done so annoyingly. Kristin is, put simply, a nuisance. She has no depth. She has no dimension. She is a woman with little to no substance other than wanting to get laid. And somehow, she has also found herself the unworthy main character of this movie.
It’s not that Collette is bad, well, she is, but the screenplay by Michael J. Feldman and Debbie Jhoon does not allow her to be anything more than a damsel in distress who manages to get herself wrapped up in the most deadly shoot-outs and attacks in Italy. Somewhere in this screenplay is an allegory for how women of her certain age are treated, but the film only explores this node of female empowerment through a scene that came off as wildly distasteful.
The juxtaposition of cutting between Kristin fighting off a rapist, ending him for good in the single most gruesome and disturbing moment in film this year so far (it’s even more disturbing if you have a twig and berries), and her colleagues ignoring her on a Zoom call, distracted by other younger, big breasted and bikini-clad women is a moment with far more taut political commentary than the filmmakers realize. Yet they prove their incompetence when devolving into references that only mention the scene through cheap scrotum jokes.
I’m offended by this level of tone deafness. On the one hand, it’s indicative of the fact that no one involved with the production stepped in to interfere with the misogyny and false feminist themes that the film explores with an “I’m better than you” approach. On the other, it treats the men that Kristin gets jiggy with as blunt obstacles for her to overcome and nothing more. One guy in particular, the dreamy Lorenzo (Giulio Corso), whom she meets within minutes after she arrives in Italy, is completely devoid of any personality. Their love smells like sour milk.
The dialogue between Kristin and her lovers reads as if it was written by an AI. Exchanges about why Kristin hasn’t seen “The Godfather” trilogy—“It’s so hard to find three and a half hours”—and how “limoncello” is pronounced—“lemon Jell-O? I prefer cherry”—made me cringe so hard that I struggled to unscrunch my face for the next forty-five minutes.
If “Mafia Mamma” was actually funny as a satire, maybe this wouldn’t feel as forced or dreadful. Unfortunately, Hardwicke’s film does not yield from taking itself WAY too seriously, dragging bloodshed and miserable familial standards into a third act that is as tired and repetitive as the life Kristin lived at the beginning of the film. This is not artistry. This is garbage in a steaming pile.