MYSTIC PIZZA
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1988 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: The lives of two sisters and a friend, pizza parlor waitresses, is not original and the individual stories are predictable, but as a whole it is a satisfying slice-of-life film and worth seeing. Rating: low +2.
MYSTIC PIZZA is a sort of a THE BEST OF EVERYTHING for the Eighties. I guess that in itself is something of a surprise: that someone is making a THE BEST OF EVERYTHING in the Eighties. It is not a film with much flash. It is just a quiet (dare I say it?) soap opera about three young women who waitress together in a pizza parlor and share each other's lives. There are the two sisters Kat and Daisy and their friend Jojo. Kat is the serious sort. She is holding down several jobs to try to earn enough to take advantage of a scholarship from Yale. Her sister Daisy is affable, attractive, and shoots a mean game of pool. She is looking to have a little bit of fun and to live a little. Jojo wants to be like Daisy. Having canceled out on her wedding day, she wants sex with her boyfriend but no commitments. MYSTIC PIZZA is really three stories, one for each woman, braided together into a single story.
Of the three stories the film concentrates mostly on the sisters' stories; neither is particularly original. Kat babysits for the daughter of a handsome young architect who happens to be a Yale graduate and whose wife is off in Europe. You can plot this one yourself. Daisy has a relationship with a rich law student with a checkered past and a bigoted family. Perhaps you cannot plot this one yourself, but it is unlikely you will be very surprised either.
So the individual stories are not much to see the film for. But this is one of those films where the whole is considerably more than the sum of its parts. For one thing, there are few enough films that show women who are friends and how their friendship works, and at times does not work.
MYSTIC PIZZA is not one of the year's best films--though I think at least one critic was claiming that it was--but at a time when so many films look alike it is a surprisingly satisfying film to watch and enjoy and hopefully is a sign of more adult films (no, I mean *literally* adult films) being made. Rate it a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
(Oh, a side note: New York City restaurants offered a dinner to go with viewing BABETTE'S FEAST, but it was about $100 a plate. After seeing TAMPOPO I could not find a Japanese noodle house nearby. For those of you who want to coordinate a movie and dinner, this is the film!)
Mark R. Leeper
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