Review of Married to the Mob (1988) by Edith N — 16 Aug 2011

Actually, Widowed From the Mob.

Somehow, I had gotten the impression that Alec Baldwin had a much bigger role in this than he does. I'm not sure where that came from; actually, I think Netflix gives him billing. This is largely because he is currently more famous than the three people who actually deserve billing. This was his fourth movie, however, and he gets whacked in the first twenty minutes. He was fresh from his major role in [i]Beetlejuice[/i], but no one involved in that movie was terribly famous at the time, either. He'd been on [i]Knots Landing[/i], so presumably he had that fan base going for him, but Matthew Modine had been in [i]Full Metal Jacket[/i]. Michelle Pfeiffer was in [i]Scarface[/i]. And of course Dean Stockwell has been acting since 1945. Even Joan Cusack, who played one of the other mob wives, had been in more movies than Alec Baldwin had at that point. Though even now, she hasn't really had any starring roles. Which is a pity, but perhaps we'll discuss it another time.

Baldwin is "Cucumber" Frank de Marco, a minor mob hitman. He lives in an extremely tacky suburban home with his wife, Angela (Pfeiffer), and their son, Joey (Anthony J. Nici). Angela is getting frustrated with their life--"everything in this house fell off the back of a truck!"--but it turns out not to matter. Frank is having an affair with one Karen Lutnick (Nancy Travis), who is also the girlfriend of Tony "the Tiger" Russo (Stockwell). Frank's boss. And Frank is a little displeased about his girlfriend's affair, so he makes his displeasure known to the pair of them. At Frank's funeral, he proceeds to hit on Angela. Molest her, even. Angela gets blamed for it, even though she's obviously trying to push him away. So she packs up Joey and moves into a grotty apartment in Manhattan--where she's being spied on by FBI agents Mike Downey (Modine) and Ed Benitez (Oliver Platt). They think she's Tony's girlfriend and their ticket to a successful prosecution. She, on the other hand, is just trying to get by.

I don't know how anyone could look at the interaction between Angela and Tony and think, "Yeah, that's a consensual relationship." At least not anyone rational. Tony's wife, Connie (Mercedes Ruehl), pretty much assumes that any woman who talks to Tony is sleeping with him. That's different. But Angela is actively struggling when she's cornered on the lawn at the funeral. It also strikes me that Angela has more sense than that--she doesn't strike me as the sort who would fool around with a married man at her own husband's funeral. It's entirely possible that she was considering walking out on Frank, though of course she didn't get around to it, but that doesn't mean she'd be that dumb. What's more, it must occur even to Connie that Tony is perfectly capable of setting Angela up in a better apartment than the one she rents in Manhattan. The evidence just doesn't fit with a relationship between the pair, and I'm a little confused at the sheer number of characters who think it does.

We as Americans seem capable of having entirely contradictory heroic archetypes in our culture. Almost since the inception of organized crime in this country, mobsters are likely to appear in our fiction as heroes. At the same time, the archetype of the Heroic Lawman is embedded in our national psyche. I suppose the idea of a mob romantic comedy was the next logical step, with the mob widow falling for the G-man. And this is very much a comedy. Yes, there's violence. On the other hand, the first seriously violent scene felt like a dream sequence, and the other plays out as farce. One of the truths of our national obsession with criminals is that, when the criminals are the heroes, we don't take the crime seriously. Within the first five minutes of the film, Frank has murdered a man (Captain Haggerty) on orders from Tony, but that never really seems as important as the fact that Joey and Tony Junior (Jason Allen) are running a three-card monte racket in the backyard. Anyway it's more of the reason Angela wants to leave.

Ultimately, the movie doesn't know what it wants to do with Angela. The romance between her and Mike doesn't work for me; Pfeiffer and Modine have no chemistry. And even if they did, I'm seriously concerned about the ethics of the situation. I'm not sure it's enough to get the case against Tony thrown out, but it's enough to destroy Mike's career. Angela could be made into a strong, powerful woman breaking free from a dangerous situation--and she still could have been funny. However, women aren't allowed to do that. Joey is only onstage when it's important to Angela as a character that she be a mother, and he is conveniently spending the night at a friend's house when she has a boyfriend over. (Though of course in movie, she only asks Mike out because she knows Joey won't be home that night.) I know a lot of men don't understand why women complain about this kind of thing, but think about what the movie could have done with Angela's character--and what they would have done to a male character in a similar situation, come to that.