Probably, you’ve got to be a second- or third-generation
Italian-American from Queens properly to appreciate Tony ‘n’
Tina’s Wedding, the long-running off-Broadway show now brought
to the silver screen by Roger Paradiso. At any rate I could not
and, apart from a few chuckles, found it woefully unfunny. Though
the film was made over three years ago, it is only now finding a
commercial release. The theatrical original was an improvisational
work in which the audience were treated as guests at the eponymous
wedding. Mr. Paradiso’s version purports to be a wedding video by
the gay Hispanic film student, Raphael (Guillermo Diaz), whose
camera always seems to be in the wrong place at the right time.
This accounts for the quasi-cinema verite look of the
film.
The slender peg on which the action is hung is the fact that the
bride’s mother, Josephina Vitale (Priscilla Lopez), thinks that her
darling Tina (Mila Kunis) is marrying beneath her in linking her
lot to Tony (Joey McIntyre). Though born and raised in the same
Queens neighborhood as his family, the Nunzios, she and her late
husband Vito subsequently moved to the upscale precincts of
Massapequa, where the Nunzios look like barbarian invaders. The
father of the groom and family patriarch, “Big Tony” Nunzio (John
Fiore) owns a strip club back in Queens called “Animal Kingdom.”
Loud, coarse and domineering, he is divorced and living with a much
younger bimbo-type named Maddy (Krista Allen). He enjoys
embarrassing his son in front of his new relations and produces an
explosive reaction among the Vitales by offering Little Tony the
strip club as a wedding present. He insists that Vito, who was
killed by being blown off a roof while trying to put up Christmas
decorations in a blizzard, “leapt to his doom” on account of his
wife. “Anything to get the f*** away from her.”
There are several attempts at comic sub-plots. One of Tina’s old
boyfriends, Michael (Adrian Grenier) turns up and tries to object
to the union before being forcibly restrained by the groom’s
brother, Dominic (Jon Bernthal). He later gets embarrassingly
drunk, strips to his underpants and sits in the wedding cake. It
sounds funnier than it is. Father Mark (Dean Edwards) also gets
(less embarrassingly) drunk, as does Sister Clare (Mary Testa),
Tina’s cousin. Tina’s brother Joey (Richard Robichaux) is a
closeted homosexual, Tony’s brother Johnny (Sebastian Stan) a
half-wit and the best man, Barry (Matthew Saldivar), is dealing
(and smoking) drugs during the reception. Vinnie Black (Richard
Portnow), proprietor of a schlock “Coliseum” where the reception is
held, is an unfunny comedian.
It will be observed that the movie’s own comic invention is not
of the most brilliant sort. Wedding movies always get a certain
comic mileage out of the contrast between the religious and
romantic trappings of the traditional wedding ceremony and the
coarseness of the impulses they are meant to sanctify, but
coarseness in Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding is a way of life and
indulged in for its own sake. At one point Big Tony taunts
Josephina, whom for a short time he dated in high school, by
saying: “You puke, you fart and you f***, just like the rest of us,
and you grew up doing it three blocks from my f***ing gutter in
Queens.”
Something of the same envious desire to drag the audience down
to his grossly physical, elemental level is detectable in the movie
itself. No “phony” middle-class airs and graces here! When poor,
incontinent Uncle Lui (Clement Fowler) tells Raphael’s camera “I
don’t like to hear women swear,” it is as much a joke as when he
pees in the holy water. We don’t get to hear his reaction to the
opinion of Connie (Kim Director), the maid of honor until she is
demoted in the field, that instead of a man, “a good vibrator, a
good dog and a good cleaning service are all a woman needs.” Or to
Barry’s best man speech, which boils down to little more than what
he obviously takes to be this compliment: “I never seen two people
who were more hot for each other than you two — sorry, sister. You
love each other and that’s what this f***ing world needs more
of.”
“Women are beautiful, they are Madonnas, if you know what I
mean,” says Uncle Lui. But what Mr. Paradiso and company suppose he
means is only that he is hopelessly imprisoned by an old world
courtliness that amounts to nothing more than pretension. In the
new world, one of the bridesmaids means something quite different
when she says to Tina: “You look like Madonna, I swear to God!”
It’s sad to see the richness of Italian culture reduced to this
level of vulgarity, but many Italian-Americans are among those who
seem to like it.
