Sometimes a movie exists for no better reason than to simply mind its business, and that’s very much the vibe I get from Nonnas. It’s a big-hearted, unhurried story of rich family history and richer cuisine, about how the love and flavours and traditions have filtered through the generations and been lost to scribbled recipes and those relatives you never call but whose signature dish you never quite forget. It’s the movie version of a lovely family dinner and has no intentions of being anything else.
The consequence of this is that it probably won’t be enough for some people. I found myself on the cusp of disinterest once or twice, even though I never stopped enjoying the process. And yet I can imagine the right person – someone recently bereaved, or with an Italian aunt that reminds them of one of the characters, or whatever – stumbling upon this movie and finding it immensely moving and valuable. Mileage may vary. It’s just that kind of experience.
It’s based on a real restaurant, too. The screenplay from Liz Maccie fictionalizes how Jody Scaravella opened Enoteca Maria, an Italian restaurant with the quietly brilliant USP of employing grandmothers instead of professional chefs. This ambition is mirrored by the Vince Vaughn (Bad Monkey) character, an MTA worker named Joe who has just lost his beloved mother and is keeping her memory alive through cooking and eating the recipes she left behind. The precise alchemical composition of her Sunday gravy eludes him, though, and in a roundabout way, the frustration leads him to the idea of bottling up the intensely nostalgic and emotional feelings provoked by the food and selling them in a restaurant on Staten Island.
With the help of his contractor friend Bruno (Joe Manganiello, Mythic Quest) and his wife Stella (Drea de Matteo, The Sopranos), Joe puts his mother’s insurance money to the task of opening a fine establishment crewed by lovable local “nonnas” (grandmothers): his mother’s ill-tempered bestie Roberta (Lorraine Bracco, The Union) and hairdresser Gia (Susan Sarandon), former nun Teresa (Talia Shire), and Sicilian Antonella (Brenda Vaccaro), whose neighbor Olivia (Linda Cardellini, Dead to Me) just so happens to be Joe’s high school sweetheart.
A still from Nonnas featuring the grandmothers at work | Image via Netflix
Given the towering works associated with some of these names – Goodfellas, The Godfather, Rocky, The Sopranos – it’s obvious that there’s an element of stunt-casting at play in Nonnas. These ladies aren’t just iconic in the neighborhood thanks to their homely cooking but iconic on a meta-level, permanent fixtures in the Italian-American Hollywood pantheon. They’re superb here, deliberately acting circles around Vaughn, who is content to deliver a very restrained and everyday performance so that he settles nicely into the background and lets the nonnas steal the show.
That sense of easygoing nostalgia comes through in the themes, which are often said aloud for good measure – cooking is a labour of love, food is an expression of culture and tradition, the old ways are the best and mustn’t be lost, and so on, and so forth. This is a theme-y movie, much more than a plotty one. Sure, there are subplots, like a crowbarred-in romantic thread between Joe and Olivia and a very half-hearted bit of conflict between Joe and the Staten Island locals who think he’s exploiting the nonnas, but it’s all beside the point.
As obvious as those underlying ideas might be, it’s still a delight to see this cast put them across. The banter between the nonnas is often brilliant, and there are a ton of tiny moments that could feasibly be a viewer’s favourite. That’s a pretty rich banquet for such a deliberately frictionless movie, and if you’re in the mood for a relaxed, charming evening, you need look no further.