Providence Phoenix

March 2, 1995

Film Review

Lookin' Italian

Lookin’ Italian. Written, directed and produced by Guy Magar. With Jay Acovone, Matt LeBlanc and Stephanie Richards. A Wing & a Prayer Production. At General Cinemas in Warwick and Lincoln and at Entertainment Cinemas in East Providence.

by Bill Rodriguez

Halfway through Lookin’ Italian, the movie it wants to be bursts free and takes over. A Passion Play with Mac-10s, a story of remorse and revenge comes out shooting, and while it may be melodramatic and bloodier than hell at least it’s honest about its urges. As it is, Lookin’ Italian is two movies. It’s a case study of what happens when Hollywood wants to grab us on the cheap, contrive characters instead of build them the old-fashioned way.

Vinny (Jay Acovone) has been a recluse in Los Angeles for the past five years, working in a used bookstore after living the high life as a New York mob guy. The movie opens with the incident that sent him off nursing his wounds: a guns-blazing fight in which Vinny charges from cover and shoots from the hip with automatics while the row of three bad(der) guys miss every one of his vital organs with their machine guns. Kind of hard on a guy, that alone, but we come to find in later flashbacks that the incident ended even more traumatically.

The bookstore, however unlikely a haven -- although he was a wise guy -- does offer colorful company in his boss (Ralph Manza), who is endearingly foul-mouthed in two languages. Working at the store with them is Vinny’s nephew Anthony (Matt LeBlanc), whose irresponsibility is indicated by his always arriving late. Always, mind you. His uncontainable boyish charm is demonstrated by his being irresistible to women, of which we, and he, get several. Since this is L.A., they are all gorgeous, of course. As a nod to feminism, they are the ones who come on to our Italian duo. The frat party dimension of Lookin’ Italian’s first 45 minutes breaks completely free of reality when yet another buxom woman calls on Anthony during a poker game and jaws drop. Literally, not like they are making a joke. Debbie Does Dallas meet the Three Stooges.

The story buried here emerges when Vinny begins to confess to Anthony why keeping the kid on the straight and narrow means so much to him. He lost a friend in that last gun battle, and he doesn’t want his nephew to head down that road. Without outside influence the worse doesn’t look about to happen, since Anthony was sent by his mother to godparents in Maine for the past five years and seems to have studied gentleness from the moose. He shocks Vinny with the multi-culti composition of his poker game, and he pole-axes relatives at a mob family Sunday dinner by bringing along an African-American blind date. What eventually precipitates his going off the deep end is a drive-by shooting that kills two of his friends right next to him. The most memorable image in the 101 minutes is of Anthony weeping in a tub, trying to shower their blood off his clothes while his uncle tries to comfort him. If the movie up to that point had shown the two of them half so naked, audiences wouldn’t have needed so many breasts.

LeBlanc -- who subsequently got a gig on NBC’s Friends — carries the acting burden here, and decently, from boyish to anguished. As for Acovone, he tends to wear emotions rather than convey them. There was a key opportunity after Vinny shares his troubling memory, but a long take of him staring out a window doesn’t resonate because nothing much appears to be happening beneath his surface.

The strongest characters are the incidental ones, because they don’t have to try too hard — they can be real. Singer Lou Rawls is that kind of laid-back as a news vendor neighbor whose son’s death Anthony witnesses. Manza, as the bookstore owner, also has that spontaneity and reminds us of the scene stolen by the haberdasher playing himself in Federal Hill. All of them could be natural. That’s the real lesson here, and why Corrente’s mini-budget movie works. Merely having Italian-Americans sound ethnic and lose their tempers every other scene is not enough. Stories that get to us need to start where we live. In other words, come on, Hollywood -- get real.