Gwyneth Paltrow portrays a suicidal poet and novelist in Sylvia.
Mambo Italiano (R) (88 min.) - Pegging Emile Gaudreault's movie as My Big Fat Gay Italian Wedding is too easy, especially since it doesn't have anything else going for it except comparison to 2002's sleeper hit, the one with Greek accents. Gaudreault, working from Steve Gallucio's stage play, does give audiences two stereotypes for the price of one, if that should be considered a bargain.
Angelo Barbarini (Luke Kirby) is a first-generation Italian-Canadian living in Montreal (it's cheaper to film there) who has realized he's homosexual. The problem is telling his stereotypically bellicose parents (Paul Sorvino, Ginette Reno). Moving out of their home was difficult enough. His parents are pushing for Angelo to get married, you know, like all good Italians do, but this isn't what they had in mind.
On cue, Angelo meets a former classmate, Nino Paventi (Peter Miller), during a camping trip and falls in love. Can he bring himself to fully assert his freedom? Will their parents scream and snipe about whose fault this is, or argue about whose son gets top position during sex? Will they assign a sexy neighbor (Sophie Lorain) to straighten out Angelo? Are there enough oddball relatives with varying degrees of tolerance to populate a sluggish 88 minutes of predictability? The answers, of course, are all yes.
Gaudreault mimics Pedro Almodovar's candy color scheme without that filmmaker's outrageousness, just the kind of passive-aggressive love we've seen Italian families pass around dinner tables since Moonstruck. Everybody gets a speech or a head slap. The homosexual angle is treated as blandly as in Kiss Me Guido, without any help from Kirby and Miller, who have zero on-screen chemistry. Add a laugh track and subtract some of the less offensive gags and Mambo Italiano could be the first three episodes of a sitcom, which would then be canceled. D
- STEVE PERSALL, Times film critic
A literary soap opera
Sylvia (R) (100 min.) - Gwyneth Paltrow's carefully measured performance is the saving grace of director Christine Jeffs' biography of poet-author Sylvia Plath, whose suicide in 1963 led to the kind of fame that might have made her wish to keep on living.
Sylvia isn't as convoluted or existential as last year's The Hours, which dealt with another suicidal writer, Virginia Woolf, and that's a relief. But it also doesn't delve deeply into the soul of its subject.
In this version, Plath seems like a dilettante whose morbid way with words is slightly ahead of her time. She meets Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) at Cambridge and instantly falls in love, although biting his cheek and drawing blood during their first date is a strange way to show it. Hughes' growing reputation as a poet becomes too much for her to handle, plunging Plath into writer's block.
That kind of artistic/romantic competition could be interesting. But Jeffs, working from John Brownlow's screenplay, makes this coupling no deeper than the show biz coupling of A Star is Born. He's famous, she isn't, boo hoo. Hughes could have taken hints from his gradual realization that Plath attempted suicide at least twice before their marriage. The coolness of their chemistry, at least as Paltrow and Craig play it, makes one wonder why he didn't skip out sooner.
Hardly any attention is paid to Plath's breakthrough novel The Bell Jar. Her posthumous collection of poems, Ariel, is barely noted except in a postscript. Jeffs seems to think Plath's art can't tell us anything about how she lived and why she died. Unlike Frida, in which Frida Kahlo's physical and emotional suffering shone through her art and reflected off the screen, Sylvia sees only a tony soap opera interrupted by pesky literary critics keeping Plath depressed.
Sylvia opens Friday at Beach Theater and Nov. 26 at the new Madstone Theater in Tampa's Hyde Park, which was formerly an AMC movie house. B-
