Maccheroni

Tonight I had much to study and very little feeling for my books. I watched this film instead: I vaguely remembered it had a poor IMDb rating, but I decided to give it a chance anyway. I'm so glad I did! I found out a delightful bitter-sweet comedy, with some good laughs and a few touching moments as well. To be true the plot about the depressed American businessman who comes to Italy and discovers the enjoyment of life has been heard before and could seem sometimes predictable, but has its great moments; the score is rather charming too. Marcello and Jack are a magnificent paring. This film is vastly and wrongfully underrated. I can't believe it's only rated 6.1: it would deserve much more. I highly recommend it to anybody loves truly great artists like Lemmon and Mastroianni.

The conceit of this odd little film is that to experience family love the late-middle-aged American man must return whence he found it -- to Italy of course!

The score is lovely but the sound quality execrable. The comedy hits Americans sideways but the location shots of Naples are breathtaking. (What can Florence be like?)

The storyline is all over the place but then it doesn't matter because we are spellbound by every scene where Lemmon and Mastroianni are together. Both are at the top of their form, not out of any sense of competing, but rather out of respect -- to their characters, to their director, and to each other.

Lemmon is the most restrained I've ever seen him. His tendency to be seen working is quelled, perhaps, by Mastroianni's generous willingness to cede the center of the stage.

So what we have is a little movie with a somewhat pretentious theme that nevertheless, because of its idiosyncrasies and contradictions, and especially because of the performances of its leads, is well worth viewing.

My review was written in October 1985 after watching the film at a Columbus Circle screening room.

"Macaroni" is a mild comedy-drama teaming the formidable talents of Jack Lemmon and Marcello Mastroianni. Stronger in expression of honest sentiment than in its humorous component, the picture faces weak theatrical prospects via Paramount release as a pickup. It was originally scheduled to be an HBO Premiere Films presentation domestically (a slot it would fill comfortably) until the pay-cable outfit dropped out of the project.

Jack Lemmon toplines as Bob Traven (the joke on the mysterious novelist B. Traven's name is never explicit here), a v.p. At McDonnell Douglas visiting Naples as a consultant to Aeritalia. It's his first time back since 1946 when, as a G.i., he was stationed there.

As an acquaintance from that period whom he has completely forgotten, Antonio Jasiello (Marcello Mastroianni) looks Traven up and takes the at-first unwilling (too busy) American around town to meet the family and friends.

It seems that everybody knows Traven, because Jasiello has been surreptitiously writing letters using Traven's name over the years to his own sister Maria, who had a brief romance in 1946 with the American. She's long-since been married and now has adult grandchildren.

Relying too heavily on its two stars, at first abrasive adversaries but later best of friends as Lemmon unbends to Mastroianni's exuberant joie de vivre, "Macaroni" rarely achieves the comedic heights of director Ettore Scola's previous work. There simply isn't an abundance of funny situations or witty dialog here.

Best sequence has amateur playwright Mastroianni filling in as the villain in one of his monthly poverty productions. Heavily made-up (and looking oddly like the late Ernie Kovacs), Mastroianni is genuinely funny in the brief skit acted with Italian dialog.

Elsewhere, this English-language film is hampered by the dialog, with merely okay readings by Mastroianni, artificial dubbing of Isa Danieli as his empathetic wife and rote, direct-sound speeches by Daria Nicolodi as Aeritalia's p.r. Officer. Thesps' acting is okay but diluted by the language distraction.

Lemmon throws himself into his role with customary passion, pumping life into some routine scenes. Pic would have benefited from some period flashback material set in 1946 (especially given Scola's work in his 1974 "We All Loved Each Other So Much") but is rooted in the present. A contrived, melancholy ending doesn't come off.

Tech credits are merely adequate, with Naples' natural beauty shining through Claudio Ragona's strictly functional photography.

This film came and went too quickly in 1985, but I was fortunate enough to see it in a movie theater at the time, and later to get the video of it. Jack Lemmon is an American business executive on a business trip to Naples (where he was stationed in World War II). He is a crabby, middle aged man, who has financial success but has lost a sense of enjoyment in life. Reenter his old friend Marcello Mastroianni, whose sister was once dating Lemmon. Lemmon is at first suspicious and standoffish (he barely recalls Mastroianni) but his curiosity makes him take up Mastroianni again. The latter is a clerk in a bank, but he is a part-time actor and dramatist, and the center of a large family group. He also has had an odd habit of dying and being resurrected again, since childhood. Lemmon gradually finds his humanity being restored, and finding he wants to be re-involved with his old friend's family. The conclusion veers to tragedy, but the conclusion is very sweet. I recommend this film strongly, to people who wish to believe.

Macaroni casts Jack Lemmon as an American businessman on a trip to Naples, his first since World War II when he traveled on a group rate and probably landed at Salerno. The Neapolitan women were most grateful to the Americans for liberation, most grateful indeed.

Over 40 years go by and Lemmon now a successful businessman is on business in Naples and he's greeted in his hotel room by an old friend he doesn't recognize. Marcello Mastroianni is at first dismissed when Lemmon doesn't recognize him, but the picture he leaves of Lemmon and his sister does the trick.

With some trepidation Lemmon seeks out Mastroianni's family and finds the sister now a matronly grandmother. Naturally he was expecting some unknown offspring, but her's can all be attributed to the husband she later married.

Mastroianni is a dreamer and a dramatist of sorts. He's involved with what we would in America call a stock company as he writes and directs and stars in little dramas of his own. In one we see him as an Italian version of Snidely Whiplash. And he's created a whole drama around Lemmon as he wrote letters in Lemmon's name recounting a life that some pulp fiction hero would have envied. You can imagine Lemmon's reaction when he learns of his other life.

Pretty soon Lemmon is sucked into the family and as things aren't going well in his personal life in America, he's soon involved with the whole family. The end however is bitter sweet.

Macaroni is essentially a two person film with no real flushing out of any of the other characters played by actors and actresses unknown to American audiences. Lemmon and Mastroianni are good together though nothing like Lemmon and Matthau, but who was?

It's an easy to take film goes better with a glass of red wine.