From the homily-stuffed script (“food is love,” “beautiful is a feeling”) to the relentlessly on-the-button soundtrack (please god, no more “Funiculì Funiculà”), “Nonnas” serves up ethnic comedy on a platter of ham and cheese.
Based on a true story, this four-grannies-and-a-funeral caper tosses finely aged ingredients — Susan Sarandon, Lorraine Bracco, Brenda Vaccaro, Talia Shire — into a slurry of Italian caricature and cliché. At its center sits Joe Scaravella (an oddly anemic Vince Vaughn), a Brooklyn transportation worker who, after his mother’s death, decides to honor her by opening a restaurant on Staten Island and hiring Italian grandmothers, or nonnas, as his chefs.
Each has a single, identifiable characteristic. Meet Roberta (Bracco), the salty Sicilian and erstwhile best friend of Joe’s mother; Antonella (Vaccaro), the feisty Bolognan widow whom Joe meets at an Italian market; Teresa (Shire), the retired nun with a cheeky secret; and Gia (Sarandon), the independent glamour-puss whose enviable cleavage demands commentary.
“How do you bake over those things?,” Roberta inquires, not unreasonably. Sadly, this is as saucy as Liz Maccie’s screenplay allows. Even when Joe reconnects with Olivia (an ill-served Linda Cardellini), the prom date he once unceremoniously dumped, the movie stubbornly refuses to spark. The director, Stephen Chbosky, appears unaware that food can be sexy, or that young Joe — in a glowing, idyllically staged flashback to 40 years earlier — is infinitely more excited by bubbling Bolognese and sugared pastries than his adult self is by Olivia. Their belated dance to Chris de Burgh’s oft-recycled “The Lady in Red” is so lacking in chemistry they might as well be neutered.
Corny and cloying, “Nonnas” struggles to gin up energy in a plot whose every roadblock (the dwindling finances, the failed building inspection, the opening-night disaster, the desperate plea for critical attention) is comfortably predictable. The movie’s real drag, though, is a main character with no identity beyond his mother’s depressing house and no personality beyond nostalgia. Joe is a void, and Vaughn — who can occasionally be riveting, as we saw in projects like “Brawl in Cell Block 99” (2017) and the unfairly maligned second season of “True Detective” (2015) — too often shuffles through his scenes as if narcotized.
This muffled affect, along with Chbosky’s pedestrian direction and his reliance on overly literal needle drops (again with the Billy Joel?), forces everyone else to work twice as hard. The ladies, professionals all, are up for it, gamely selling sitcom setups and prepackaged sentiment with a gusto that suggests a better, more authentic movie might have lurked beyond the bromides. One where, when a former nun prays for a miracle, it won’t arrive before she has even dusted off her knees.
Nonnas
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
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