by Brandon Carter
Coastal Journal staff

John Turturro was the guest of honor at last week’s Maine International Film Festival (MIFF) and as such received two rewards:  First was the Mid-Life Achievement Award, an honor that is always unseemly to bestow on an actor who is still very much vital and working.  The second was priceless:  The second was a reintroduction to his body of work as an actor, writer, producer, and director.

Since this was a film festival, let’s just say his work in the Adam Sandler canon was underepresented.  In fact, with over 100 films to screen in a week, the task of selecting a handful of films featuring Turturro would have been unenvious.  Thus, his creative work behind the camera took center stage, while his brilliance in front of the lens was revisited with Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and the Coen Brothers’ cult classic The Big Lebowski.

Turturro’s first feature as a writer/director was Mac (1991), an autobiographical piece centered around family business.  As the title character, Turturro earnestly guides the viewer through the complexities of starting a business with your brothers.  The film, like DeNiro’s Bronx Tale, registers very much as the first feature film from a brilliant actor who doesn’t quite know the ropes as a director but understandably thought he might.  The acting, however, including Turturro’s performance, is inspired and thus worthy of seeing.

His next film is unexpectedly skilled.  Perhaps great.  Illuminata (1999), set in turn-of-the-century New York, introduces us to a group of dramatists and actors trying to assemble art out of rubbish.  Turturro plays Tuccio, a frustrated playwright in a frustrating marriage to Rachel (real-life wife Katherine Borowitz), mother hen to an ensemble of clueless actors.  When their mediocre production of  “Cavalleria Rustica” is dashed, Tuccio seizes the opportunity to bring his own play, “Illuminata,” to life.  As the title suggests, the play is quite revealing of the complex dynamic between Tuccio and Rachel.  Sadly, it’s not a terribly good play. 

What is good, however, is Turturro’s lightness of touch.  Equal parts Bergman and Altman, the film is brimming with the same brilliant energy in some of Turturro’s best performances, but as a director he is able to deftly calibrate the performances of his actors to hit both comedic and oddly dramatic notes.  For a meta-film exploring the nature of performance and art in relation to both “real” institutions and artistic ones, it doesn’t feel pretentious either.  The cast, which includes Susan Sarandon, Beverly D’Angelo, Rufus Sewell, and Christopher Walken before he could only parody himself, work as hard to entertain as the unskilled characters in the film do.  Except these are not amateurs.

Romance and Cigarettes (2007) is a little closer to what one might expect from an artist whose onscreen personas tend to lean toward the insane, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  The first thing Romance and Cigarettes does right is toss a wrench into the gears of the American Musical, a medium which has progressed a distressingly slight distance since the Golden Age of the 40s and 50s.  More War of the Roses than Annie, Romance and Cigarettes bursts to life when Kitty (Susan Sarandon), discovers a horrid little poem her husband Nick (James Gandolfini) has written to his mistress (the irreplaceable Kate Winslet).  If you’ve ever been bothered by the presupposition that you’re supposed to suspend your disbelief while characters leave the reality you’ve already suspended your disbelief for to scale the heights of spontaneous song, this is the musical for you. Nothing comes easy in the film (certainly not your enjoyment of the music itself) and Galdofini and Sarandon are convincing as a couple so staunch and bitter that, indeed, singing is the only way to truly express themselves without killing each other.  It’s an abrassive but exciting mess.  Here’s to hoping he continues to write and direct.