Film Review: Romance and Cigarettes

When my professor assigned the movie "Romance and Cigarettes" for a homework assignment, I was excited. Score! Movies for homework! Biology majors, envy me! Then I watched it and realized the cruel joke my professor was playing on us. This movie was not going to be normal and it was not going to be easy to interpret, but it was still better than biology.

"Romance and Cigarettes" tells the story of a working class man, Nick Murder, who has just been caught cheating by his wife. Throughout the film he tries to negotiate his feelings of lust for his mistress with his feelings of resentment but love for his wife and the family they have together. Except there's a twist; it's a musical. It's a twisted, sadistic, terrifying musical. Pregnant prostitutes dance in the street, Christopher Walken murders his lover, James Gandolfini sings tied up in chains, James Gandolfini sings....it's absolutely nuts. Then there's Kate Winslet's character, or at least someone who vaguely resembles Winslet. My jaw dropped with the first scene and I couldn't reattach it to my face until the movie ended. 

The director, John Turturro, didn't just want to make a grey movie about working class America. He also didn't just want to make a flashy musical, so he made both. He combined the spontaneity and showmanship of a 50's musical with the quiet desperation of the American working class. The result is a zany and whimsical yet dark and raunchy romp. I found myself asking how all these "A List" actors could have been roped into playing these parts, but you gotta give them credit. A movie as strange as this one demands complete commitment from its players, and the actors in this film deliver nothing less. They commit whole heatedly to playing out these desperate and sometimes animalistic characters. 

Despite how shocking the film comes off, it has a message that any person can understand; we all need a little romance in our lives. Turturro suggests needing romance may even be a vice, but something we need all the same. The characters fantasized that their lives amount to something more magical than the reality they know is their own. This theme is established early on in the film, when Nick's wife finds a rhyming note written to his mistress. She thinks he is ridiculous, but he exclaims "it's poetry!" The rest of the film focuses on how ordinary people living ordinary lives try to find the "poetry" in their lives. Though the places they find it might be a little wacky (the lingerie store, the diner, a cheap motel room), Turturro sets out to prove that our lives would be empty without romance.