MARRIED TO THE MOB
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1988 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Dull, unfunny comedy about the families of mobsters without a single believable characterization or situation. I was not fond of Demme's SOMETHING WILD, but it was four times the film this is. Rating: low 0.
I guess it is really hard to describe what makes something funny or not funny. There is something about delivery where the same joke told by two different people will be funny told by only one and perhaps one person will find it funny and one will not. I can see that a lot of the humor in MARRIED TO THE MOB was supposed to be funny but I cannot remember a single joke that was actually funny in the entire film. You just have a film with a lot of silly situations and none of them make it to being funny. Jonathan Demme has a real ear for how people don't talk and a real feeling for how people don't behave.
Angela De Marco (Michelle Pfeiffer) is a CLAP (that's a Crime Lord American Princess) who likes her luxurious lifestyle but does not like the thought that it was provided entirely by crime. When her husband is murdered and a big Mafiosi--Tony ("The Tiger") Russo, played by Dean Stockwell)--tries to make her his mistress, she gives her entire house and its contents to charity and goes penniless with her son to live in New York City and start a new life. Ah, but the ties to the old life are harder to cut than that. The FBI wants to use DeMarco to catch Russo. Part of the task goes to Agent Mike Downey (Matthew Modine playing the part looking and behaving like a high school student pretending to be an FBI agent). Downey incompetently not only gets spotted by DeMarco, but starts dating her.
Now all of this could have been a funny set of circumstances. There are a lot of odd scenes, but none ever get even near to funny. Or Demme's film could have been whimsical if he had given some real depth to his characters. that was the approach of John Huston's PRIZZI'S HONOR. But there characters are all flat stereotypes of little intrinsic warmth or interest. They are mostly hoods with room temperature IQs; rich, spoiled, screaming wives of hoods; and FBI agents whom you would not trust to be crossing guards. This is a flat, uninteresting, totally insight-free look behind the headlines at the families of crime figures. The characters are better forgotten; the humor is not forgettable because it is almost impossible to find in the first place. This film is to PRIZZI'S HONOR what HOGAN'S HEROES is to STALAG 17. Rate MARRIED TO THE MOB a low 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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