At the beginning of the penultimate episode of this season of The Bear, Syd (Ayo Edebiri) and Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), with only hours left on the doomsday clock until the money hose runs dry at the show’s titular restaurant, bump into each other and have a heart-to-heart outside to clear the air.
“The businesses in the world that give the most amount of joy—or try to anyway, right?—unfortunately, they’re all just shitty-ass businesses,” Jimmy says with an off-brand twinge of regret after he asks Syd if he let her down. “Right?”
It’s a lovely little exchange that leads to flashes of Syd’s memories of her departed mother and serves as an appetizer for the main course of “Tonnato”: the long-awaited reunion—for audiences since basically the show’s beginning, for Carm (Jeremy Allen White) since probably as long as he can remember—between our pent-up head chef and his mother (Jamie Lee Curtis), an ever-hovering presence (like Mikey, like Joel McHale’s anxiety-inducing dickhead of a boss) that he can’t shake. It’s a moving interaction, and stands out, along with the riveting play-like finale, as one of the season’s brightest moments.
But going back to Jimmy’s “shitty-ass businesses” observation: In the mid ’90s, Platt, then an exciting actor in New York, was the associate producer of a film teeming with a lot of exciting NYC actors: Big Night. The cast is remarkable, as are the performances they give, with Stanley Tucci (who co-wrote and -directed the comedy), Tony Shalhoub, Minnie Driver, Isabella Rossellini, and Liev Schreiber—not to mention a firecracking Ian Holm, a charming Allison Janney, and a very funny and fast-talking Campbell Scott (Tucci’s co-director). And the story of Big Night drives home what a “shitty-ass” and unfair business restaurants (and, indeed, filmmaking) can be—and what joy a memorable meal or scene can bring.
Much like The Bear, it’s meta, as much about the survival of their respective restaurants as the creative work we’re watching and the struggle to make something truly great. Both, too, have a lot of scenes of relatives bickering with each other in kitchens, plenty of food porn, and big, beating hearts beneath all the arguing and fuming.
Big Night centers on two brothers who are clearly fed up with each other. After immigrating from Italy, they opened a restaurant, Paradise, on the Jersey Shore in the 1950s. Shalhoub plays Primo, the oldest, a brilliant but unrecognized chef who sees his cuisine as sacred art and is impressed by neither money nor success. “People should come just for the food,” he complains. Later, during a beautifully performed breakdown on the beach, he spells it out plainly: “You want me to make a sacrifice. No. If I sacrifice my work, it dies. It’s better that I die.” As far as, to quote Boogie Nights, “the good-old American green stuff,” he has no interest, telling a local artist who pays for his meals with paintings, “Money? Please. What would I do with money?”
His younger brother, Secondo (Tucci), who runs the restaurant, is not like that. He recognizes his brother’s genius (like, many at The Bear do with Carmy), but sees that achieving the American Dream may take some sacrifices to quality and vision. (When he suggests taking seafood risotto off the menu, his brother sarcastically scoffs that they should sub hot dogs in its place.) He’s clearly taken with the images of success around him, be it next year’s Cadillac (in a fun bit with Scott’s car salesman) or Pascal’s, the bustling and flashy restaurant around the corner led by Holm’s hilarious, foulmouthed, and energetic namesake. Pascal advises Secondo to dumb down Paradise’s approach: “Give the people what they want, then later you can give them what you want.”
Paradise is going to close. But Pascal convinces Secondo that if they cook a meal for his friend, jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Prima, and his band that it could create enough of a buzz to give the restaurant more time. That—spoiler alert—Prima doesn’t show isn’t surprising, but it is nevertheless heartbreaking, the death knell for two brothers’ onetime dream. And that Primo cooked up the greatest meal the motley group of people who did show have even eaten, with the last of their money, is an extra ironic turn of the knife. The film is simultaneously a feel-good comfort watch that’s also insightful and, at points, tragic.
But the thing that really stands out watching Big Night now is how tightly scripted (it was co-written by Joseph Tropiano) and generous it is with actors. Rossellini and Driver (portraying Secondo’s mistress and girlfriend, respectively) are given a fantastic scene in front of the restaurant that further shades both of their characters outside of how they affect the film’s failing restaurateur. And the direction, while never showy, can be impressive (there’s a nice steadycam shot from the closed Paradise to the booming Pascal’s), clever (a funny visual gag with the lamp in the latter establishment’s office) and, occasionally, beautiful.
The final five dialogue-free minutes of the film—taking place in the morning-after hangover of the evening before, after the brothers had screamed out everything they’d been holding inside and came to blows (a sequence that calls to mind that aforementioned Bear finale, Carm’s refrigerator freak-out in season two, and the show’s constant underlining of art-vs.-commerce and familial frustrations)—make for an all-timer ending. The younger sibling serves his brother breakfast and embraces him. With the camera slowly moving so the two are in the center of the frame, Primo embraces him back, delivering a bittersweet final note and saying everything without a single word.
