In Staten Island, there’s an Italian restaurant that offers classic dishes just like your grandma used to make—because, you see, the chefs are grandmas, cooking recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation.
It’s a cute enterprise, and the basis for Nonnas, a feel-good Netflix fable that’s so slathered in ethnic stereotypes, homilies, and bathos that it clearly wants to be a modern-day My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Come for the healthy servings of capuzzelle, zeppole, and scungilli, but prepare to choke on the stale and squishy platitudes about family and tradition. (Nonnas premieres on Netflix May 9.)
As a young boy, Joe Scaravella (Theodore Helm) returns from a bakery to a warm, bustling household of friends and relatives. In the kitchen, he beams at the sight of his angelic mom (Kate Eastman) and Nonna (Karen Giordano) making the latter’s magical Sunday gravy. The secret to that sauce, says Nonna, is “You feel in your heart. You put in your heart.”
Forty years later, Joe attempts to follow her lead in the aftermath of his mom’s death, but alas, the now-grown man (Vince Vaughn) can’t figure out how to duplicate Nonna’s sweet masterpiece. Even so, he’s talented enough to impress his best friend Bruno (Joe Manganiello) and his wife Stella (Drea de Matteo) with approximations of his ancestor’s delicacies.
Joe works in an MTA auto body shop and has spent his life putting his skills to use on the sweet car that Bruno inherited from his dad. Following his mother’s passing, he finds himself adrift, and on a whim, he travels to the Staten Island Italian food market that he used to visit with his beloved matriarchs. There, he runs into Olivia (Linda Cardellini), a widow whom he ditched at the prom decades earlier, and who’s super-close with her elderly neighbor Antonella (Brenda Vaccaro), whose day-to-day consists of sitting at her dining table talking to a portrait of her deceased husband.
Later, he spies a derelict restaurant and opts, on the spot, to buy it. While Bruno had encouraged Joe to use his mom’s life insurance money to pursue his dreams (and find some purpose), he’s less than thrilled with this rash decision, and he’s even more skeptical about Joe’s plan to staff the kitchen with nonnas, who’ll whip up their signature concoctions and make the place feel like home.
Joe thus becomes the little entrepreneur that could, encouraged by Olivia’s opinion that “great things stand the test of time” and that “it’s never too late to start everything all over again.”
Mushy groaners are what’s on Nonnas’ menu, whose script by Liz Maccie never met a moment it didn’t want to render obvious and sentimental. “Food is love!” announces Joe, whose mom taught him that “one does not grow old at the table,”, and he quickly sets about recruiting a staff.
First on the list is his mom’s grouchy best friend Roberta (Lorraine Bracco), next is Antonella, and last is retired nun Teresa (Talia Shire) and hairdresser Gia (Susan Sarandon). Together, they’re an adorable senior-citizen quartet who joke about Craigslist, quarrel about heritage, bond over limoncello, and rally around Joe, whose love of the old ways marks him as an aww-shucks sweetie-pie with a dream worth championing.
As befitting a corny comedy such as this, Joe has everything on the line and faces daunting odds, not only because local jerk Al (Michael Rispoli) is intent on sabotaging the place (due to the fact that Joe is an outsider), but also because he doesn’t know how to build or operate a restaurant.
Ruinous fires and run-ins with building inspectors are some of the obstacles Joe and his cohorts face on their way to inevitable triumph, and Stephen Chbosky’s film dramatizes every scene with maximum clunkiness, so that there’s no surprise and even less energy. All of Nonnas’ nonnas have one defining characteristic, and none of them are given a single line worthy of a chuckle. Nonetheless, they’re more animated than Vaughn, who coasts through his performance with such bland inexpressiveness that it almost feels like he stumbled onto the set at the last minute and did the best he could with an unfamiliar script.
Given Vaughn’s typical funniness, his tepid turn sabotages Nonnas, since without even a faint dash of humor, the proceedings prove to be simply a mawkish ode to embracing one’s roots.
Talking about her and Joe’s losses, Olivia muses, “Grief—it doesn’t have a timeline, so why should we?” Asking God for help in launching the restaurant (which is named after Joe’s mom, naturally), Teresa prays about her colleagues, “They have generations of family in their heart.” Regarding the growing sparks between Joe and Olivia, Antonella tells the former, “Don’t let old hurts get in the way of a happy new beginning.” And when the restaurant initially can’t attract any customers or press reviews, Roberta wails, “I’m something here! This means something to me! I’m not discarded and I don’t feel discarded!”
Broken mother-child fences are mended, dilemmas are solved through tenacity and teamwork, and big boisterous meals are shared by diners whose delight over their main courses and desserts is written boldly across their exalted faces. Nonnas is a movie made for people with a limitless appetite for cheese, and amidst its heartwarming mush—be it Gia explaining that her va-va-voom bustiness is the result of post-mastectomy implants, or Teresa admitting that she never consummated her lesbian love—it delivers every predictable twist and turn imaginable.
Joe and Bruno have a temporary falling out. Joe and Olivia rekindle their sparks, with the latter finally moving on from the death of her husband. And Joe convinces a hoity-toity critic (Campbell Scott) to get off his high horse long enough to experience the nostalgic wonder of his grannies’ gourmet cuisine.
Its yesteryear action shot in crude haziness and its present-day action undone by unimaginative compositions and dreary interior cinematography, Nonnas has a TV-movie aesthetic that’s in keeping with its across-the-board gracelessness. Regardless of its real-life inspiration—highlighted, of course, by end-credits footage of Joe Scaravella’s actual restaurant—it’s a second-rate dish not worth ordering.
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