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Mafia Mamma ★★½
(MA) 101 minutes
Toni Collette must be one of the busiest actors around. She’s ubiquitous – everything everywhere all at once.
Actually, that’s one of the few films she hasn’t been in, but she can currently be seen in a variety of moods, genres and circumstances in the cinema and on streaming services.
Mafia Mamma proves Toni Collette has maintained her flair for physical comedy.Credit: Cristina Di Paolo Antonio © Abundance Pictures Ltd
Mafia Mamma finds her in slapstick mode as Kristin Balbano, a woman who’s facing a failing marriage and a stalled career when her life is upturned by a sudden demand from Italy. Her grandfather, whom she barely knew, is dead and he’s left her the family business. She must leave for Rome in the next 24 hours.
The demand comes from her grandfather’s trusted aide, Bianca, played by Monica Bellucci, whose sexual magnetism has now combined with her natural air of command to a point where she doesn’t have to speak at all to transmit the message: don’t mess with me. And the film’s feminist tilt means that she proves to be on Kristin’s side. This, however, is not as reassuring as it might seem since the family business is organised crime.
Kristin (Toni Collette) and Bianca (Monica Bellucci) in the blood-soaked comedy Mafia Mamma.Credit: Fabrizio Di Giulio
Collette throws herself into the role with great energy, which is fortunate because she needs it. The trouble starts immediately after she arrives. As her grandfather’s funeral procession leaves the church after the ceremony, the coffin is sprayed with bullets as prelude to a gun battle between the Balbanos and their arch enemies, the Romanos.
The action from then on is ludicrously fast and furious, with a generous helping of blood and gore presented in forensic detail. It’s cartoon violence but I wouldn’t recommend seeing the film before or after meals.
Everything about it is dispensed with a heavy hand, including the jokes, as Kristin undergoes a radical makeover – from her clothes and make-up to her psychological conversion from compliant wife, mother and downtrodden executive employee to fully formed feminist. She walks out on her job with a pharmaceutical company run by a smirking boys’ club and starts listening to Bianca, who has much to teach her about the art of self-preservation.
In the course of all this, there is much bumbling about, some of it on the mark, some of it woefully mistimed. The star turns are Aldo (Francesco Mastroianni) and Dante (Alfonso Perugini), Kristin’s bodyguards, two clowns with a talent for the smoothly executed misstep. But Bellucci too has her funny moments, largely because she retains her sense of high drama no matter how absurd the goings-on around her.
Mafia Mamma is a farce with feminist credentials.Credit: Fabrizio Di Giulio
There are lots of dubious moral implications here. After all, mafia dons – or donnas, as Kristin prefers to be called – are not usually held up as feminist role models, but the film wastes no time in its efforts to get around these quibbles. That old reliable, the jolly montage, is lavishly employed. The family’s cover business is a winery and we’re invited to share in the jubilation at the speed in which Kristin turns it into a going concern.
The casualty rate is harder to explain. The self-defence argument doesn’t quite account for the ferocity with which she does away with the opposition, or for director Catherine Hardwicke’s fondness for lingering over the details.
And the big question remains. Why try to make comedy out of the mafia when The Sopranos and Goodfellas have already done such a great job of mixing violence and gallows humour, while managing to incorporate and analyse a catalogue of political and ethical paradoxes along the way?
To come up with the right answer to that question, the film would have to be witty enough to invoke a comparison with those two classics, and there is no way anyone could claim that for it. Admittedly, it isn’t setting out to be so ambitious. It’s a farce with feminist credentials designed to take Collette back to the knockabout humour that kick-started her career in the early ’90s. And it does prove that she’s still up for anything. She’s maintained her flair for physical comedy and her double-takes are works of art but with this script, it’s not enough. The writers have let her down.
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Mafia Mamma is in cinemas April 13.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
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