Another Place and Time
Seeing that Roger Ebert had given “Big Night” four stars made your own night a little less small.
You weren’t sure you wanted to walk 26 minutes to a tiny theater for a late showing of this old film. But when you saw the late-great reviewer’s decades-old endorsement, you closed your laptop and put on your shoes.
What a pleasure to once again see a new-to-you film, in a theater, knowing that after taking in this movie filmed in a different time of your life (1996), set in a different time in our country’s life (1950s), you could walk home and read the words that supported those stars.
You had added Big Night to your calendar two weeks ago after the local theater’s newsletter announced a single showing. Until then, you had no recollection of the film’s initial incarnation. The promotional image of young versions of Tony Shalhoub (who plays Primo, a chef of rare culinary gifts) and Stanley Tucci (the chef’s brother and manager), set against the festive and sensual atmosphere of a busy Italian restaurant, compelled you to add Big Night to your calendar. Yet you didn’t buy a ticket right away and, alas, when the date arrived that single showing had sold out. Fortunately, the theater scheduled a second showing for the same night. As you were less-than decisive in the hours before showtime, you remembered what you used to do and you realized, given the film’s release date, you could do so again: Find out what Roger Ebert says. You glimpsed the perfect-star rating and read nary a word more.
That is, until after you experienced this movie, which is ostensibly about the power of food but really about the complexity of human ingredients that come from the same source. Various scenes of Big Night feel like home footage of two brothers bringing all of themselves to their relationship — awkwardness, frank honesty, withheld dishonesty, quick-to-the-surface rage that stems from a shared history paired with unequally distributed talent, and the failure of understanding that occurs, even among blood brothers, when two people have different modes of perception. This documentary-esque quality is most poignantly shown in the payoff, the wordless denouement, when for a few moments Shalhoub and Tucci seem to cease acting as their respective characters and merely and deeply display love of a sort that maybe only brothers know.
To then have that sensory experience of the film layered, like a Primo timpano, by Ebert’s voice on the page — as he summarized and stylized as only he could — made for a big night, indeed.
“The surprises in the plot involve not only secret romance but heartbreak and long-held frustration” he wrote nearly thirty years ago, “for if genius is great, it is nevertheless not easy to be genius’ brother.”
If only for a few paragraphs, then, you returned to a past world, a world in which the atmosphere of a movie is amplified by a great writer — a world in which a phrase like “two thumbs-up” meant something to everyone — a world in which the big screen of shared experience held a greater prominence and no one had even a notion of the thumbs up that would become ubiquitous to the future private, small-screen-centric existence.
That the characters couldn’t post pictures of their plates seems not incidental to the reason these years later Big Night still delivered a satisfying meal.