BIG NIGHT (66)

Directed by: Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott

Starring: Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub, Ian Holm, Minnie Driver

The Pitch: New Jersey, circa 1950 : a restaurant run by two Italian immigrant brothers faces ruin because of the older brother's refusal to pander to his customers' "barbaric" tastes.

Theo Sez: A lovingly-prepared dish, simmered gently till it's wonderfully tender ; though there's maybe not enough seasoning, and the ingredients aren't quite as fresh as they might be. The struggle between integrity and commercial blandishments - Art and Mammon - is central to our modern definition of what it means to be an Artist (presumably an offshoot of 19th-century Romanticism, with its emphasis on individual worldviews - certainly, earlier eras had no problem with the idea of artists at the service of their patrons), and the stubborn individualist here is all too familiar a figure, too abstract to really mean very much - he's too aloof, too unconcerned about success ("What would I want with money?") ; the whole theme was much more powerful in TIN CUP, where you could sense what our (more conflicted and unhappy) hero was sacrificing by staying true to himself. The rest of it similarly flirts with abstraction, determinedly low-key and open-ended, except that it fills the gaps with little pockets of humanity - most notably in the central set-piece, the "big night" itself ; its half-formed quality is in the end exactly right, for it reflects our hero's predicament - caught between two cultures, a weak character torn between two stronger (and diametrically opposite) ones, floating in the middle. The film also floats between two cultures, tight in its storytelling as befits an American movie but also - like a Rohmer or a Techine - more about confusion than decision, inconclusiveness more than resolution. Maybe all films will eventually tread this middle path, adding a bit of real-life mess to intelligent contrivance ; certainly, the chasm between Hollywood and Europe no longer looks quite so unbridgeable.