We May Lose, But We Have Belief On Our Side: "Big Night"
Generational arguments are a mug's game. Making grand statements about Baby Boomers or Millennials or Gen Z might feel satisfying (and certainly feeds the appetite for self-righteousness that underlies so much of our contemporary culture) but sooner or later these statements run up against the fact of on-the-ground individuality.
The way the ether of a time affects us varies greatly from person to person, and there can be as many differences between people born in the same year as there are between people born thirty years apart. It's not that there are no commonalities between, say, people born during the 1970s; it's just that the culture of the 1980s may have turned some of these people into anti-establishment thinkers and fans of hardcore anti-Reaganite punk music, while that same culture may have turned others into pastel-wearing commentators for the National Review.
What's not a mug's game, I think, is trying to identify the cultural tenor of a moment and the artworks produced during it. To assume too much unanimity here is of course a mistake too – not all movies made in 1996 have the same sensibility, and the exceptions are often as interesting as the standards – but movie cycles do exist, and they do have some relationship to the culture out of which they're born.
All of which is to say that I'd like to put down some thoughts about that lost decade of the 1990s, without resorting to any grandiose claims about the generation that came of age during it.
The ‘90s was a decade at least partly formed (perhaps they all are) by what preceded it, and the arts in the 1980s were defined by bombast, surface, and spectacle.
This happy shimmer is a large part of the a reason people idolize the pop music of the ‘80s, which seems to epitomize "fun" – a word here with a strong, and positive, connotation of lack of depth – and it's a large part of the reason the ‘80s was the decade that brought to its first full flowering the genre of the action movie. Say what you will about the “thematics" of Die Hard or Aliens (and these certainly do exist), what they do not have are the attempts at stupendous moral grandiosity of our own superhero movie cycle. Even a Basquiat rides on the surface and relies on its raiment – these are, in some sense, the sources of its fury.
And out of the glossy shards of all this came the 1990s. When Kurt Cobain sang "Here we are now, entertain us, I feel stupid and contagious," in a song named after a deodorant known for its bubbly ad campaigns, he was articulating an ironic reaction to the saturation of culture by meaningless consumerism, a conformity of buying, a hegemony of fun. Nirvana was, of course, deeply influenced by a great deal of '80s music, but it was in the '90s that for a brief moment this kind of anti-spectacular mindset found a foothold in the larger culture.
That this mindset would lose was inevitable. Eventually the great plastic maw of consumerism would eat the rebels up, every one, and most of them knew (if not admitted) it – they had, after all, seen what happened to the 1960s. But here's the key fact: that they were doomed did not dim their hope. This is one of our contemporary paradoxes. Resistance, be it political, cultural, or environmental, is futile; but for certain folks that futility is immaterial: they are driven to it anyway.
The ‘90s, in other words, were a decade of hope leveraged against inevitable failure. One sees this very clearly in Big Night, a film entirely its own but also representative of the independent cinema cycle that formed Hollywood's reaction to the ‘80s as surely as grunge formed pop music's reaction.
Written by Stanley Tucci and Joseph Tropiano, and directed by Tucci and Campbell Scott, Big Night is a bittersweet comedy that tells the story of two Italian immigrant brothers operating a restaurant called Paradise on the East Coast in the 1950s. Primo (Tony Shalhoub), is the older. He’s fantastically talented, impossibly stubborn, and purely devoted to a cuisine in which there are no compromises. "Do you know what happens in that restaurant every night?" he rages about a popular Italian joint across the street called Pascal's that has dumbed down its food to appeal to its customers, "Rape! Rape! The rape of cuisine!"
Secundo (Tucci) is the younger.He’s an impeccable front-of-the-house man who’s devoted to the food and to his maestro of a brother but also knows that Primo's insistence on doing things his way rather than the way the customer expects is dooming their restaurant. They’ve run through the loan they took out to start the business, and are facing bankruptcy.
To the rescue comes Pascal, the owner of the cuisine-assaulting restaurant (a wonderfully bombastic Ian Holm). Out of the goodness of his heart, he offers to invite his friend the singer Louis Prima to have dinner at Paradise; with the aide of a little press coverage, this celebrity appearance will be sure to generate business for the brothers. Unfortunately, there are some complications to this plan. Pascal covets Primo's magical cooking and Secundo's charm and wants them to work for him; Secundo is sleeping with Pascal's wife Gabriella (Isabella Rossellini); and Secundo's girlfriend Phyllis (Minnie Driver) would like him to make a decision about whether or not he's serious about their relationship.
All of this leads to the big night of the title: a feast at Paradise, put on for Louis Prima, at which all of these complications will be sorted out. Although "feast" is not a big enough word: it is a monumental meal, a perfection, a gastronomic epoch onto itself, "the best meal I will ever eat" says Gabriella, or, as her husband Pascal puts it to Primo: "Goddamn it, I should kill you! This is so fucking good I should kill you!"
And as it turns out, as much as Pascal loves the food, he never contacted his friend Louis Prima. By convincing the brothers to squander their last resources this way he manages to ruin them, leaving them no choice but to come work in his restaurant.
An "independent film" usually means a film that doesn't have the financial backing of a major studio. But in the 1990s in America the genre also had a certain distinct feeling, accompanied by recognizable technical elements.
Watch Dazed and Confused or Drugstore Cowboy or Swingers or Hard Eight or Reservoir Dogs or Bottle Rocket or Kicking and Screaming or Singles any of the other indie films of that moment and you will see – regardless of whether their directors went on into big budget filmmaking, or continued to make independent projects, or both – a devotion to acting, to the camera as an almost painterly tool, and to a vision of human complexity. It was a moment deeply influenced by the American New Wave cinema of the late '60s and early '70s (among many other things) and one that broke with a good deal of the surface theatricality that defined the ‘80s.
Big Night exemplifies this style. The camera work is considered, the framing meticulous, and it operates via a tendency for long takes that place the focus squarely on the nuances of the actors' portrayals of their characters.
There are quiet visual gags, like a conversation between Secundo and Pascal in which a table lamp impairs their sight line until Pascal swats it out of the way in annoyance, and beautiful character moments, such as when Primo, distracted by his shy love for the owner of a flower shop, climbs into her display case while looking for centerpieces for the party. The film is also immaculately written and relies on close observations of human nature – even Campbell Scott's minor turn as a Cadillac salesmen who ends up at the party is nuanced, his irrepressible desire to promote his product tempered by a philosophical outlook.
In all of this, Big Night is an example of the ways technical elements – the layers of its construction – mesh with what I was earlier calling the tenor of its moment. The story of the film pits Primo's adamantine belief in the importance of his art – "To eat good food is to be close to god," he says – against the realities of the consumer-driven market in which he operates; this market is exemplified by Pascal, who explains that "I'm a businessman. I'm anything I need to be at any time." In this sense, it’s about the pursuit of a higher aesthetic calling, not for its own sake but because of the non-monetary value that pursuit brings into our lives.
This is reflected in the composition of the film. It’s not simply that this composition – the way the camera moves, what it takes in, the positions and gestures and performances of the actors, etc. – is beautifully calculated. Die Hard and Alien and The Big Chill are calculated in the same way. But in those films and others like them, which can be used as admittedly overly-broad approximations of the kind of cultural moment the '90s indie scene was in contrapuntal relationship with, the calculation goes to scale and visceral impact. They would like to overwhelm us, to awe us with their force. Here, the filmmakers’ technique reaches for something something different, something closer to authenticity.
Perhaps the shot that lingers the longest in memory from the film is its final one, which takes place on the morning after the party. All of the glorious illusions from the night before have been decimated: Primo and Secundo's restaurant will fail, the two brothers have had a fistfight in the sand over their long-running frustrations, Secundo's girlfriend has found out about his mistress and left him. It’s morning now, in the kitchen of the restaurant. The brothers’ one employee – busboy, dishwasher, and sous chef Cristiano (Marc Anthony) – is asleep on the large butcher block that backs the industrial stove.
Secundo enters, exhausted, and begins preparing an omelet. He heats the pan and beats the eggs. Cristiano wakes slowly, has a sleepy look around, and fetches a basket of bread. Secundo finishes the omelet and plates it for them, leaving a portion in the pan. They begin to eat. After a moment Primo enters, perhaps a bit uncertainly because of his fight with Secundo the night before; Secundo serves him the last of the omelet. Cristiano wanders out and the two brothers sit and eat, putting their arms around each other's shoulders for a moment.
There is no dialogue. The shot runs for almost five and a half minutes with only a single slow camera move.
It's a shot that sums up a good deal of the movie, with its focus on the simple beauty of cooking, the necessity of it, and the fact that it’s this craft that holds the brothers together against the assaults of the world.
It has none of the flash of the famed long takes in Goodfellas (or of their restaging in Swingers), nor does it have the relentless beauty and imposed awareness of Tarkovsky's extended takes; instead, in its quietness and simplicity it forwards a belief in the small-bore, the grounded realities of everyday life, and of the feelings of completeness and authenticity to be found therein. (Out of critical good conscience I should also note the comparison to the similar kitchen shots in The Big Chill, including the one that ends that film, which belies an affinity; but it’s an affinity that reveals difference as much as similarity.)
The brothers, at the end of the movie, have lost. Like the crooks in Reservoir Dogs, their dreams have been annihilated by the realities of the world. But in an important sense, that defeat cannot touch them. "You will never have my brother," Secundo tells Pascal after finding out that the other restaurateur has betrayed him. "He lives in a world above you. What he has, and what he is, is real."
Primo's art, that is, is not a matter of surface qualities. It is not about flash or fun or glamour or the desperate need for the kind of entertainment that Kurt Cobain so reviled. And because of this, perhaps, it is an art of the doomed. But to be doomed is not to be defeated.
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