Crimes:
— Tittering endlessly over silly,
comically exaggerated sex acts and crude language, without really coming to
terms with its intended themes about how sexuality, infidelity, loyalty, and
love intersect
— Tossing in a bunch of pop hits,
which the characters lip-sync to or karaoke awkwardly over, sometimes doing
both in one big, sloppy number
— Generally being an incoherent,
self-indulgent, crazed mess that was probably a lot more fun for the cast than
for viewers
Defenders: Writer-director
John Turturro and his 14-year-old son, Amadeo Turturro.
Tone of commentary: Weird, but
cheerful and companionable. Amadeo appears in one shot and was clearly a
sounding board when the film was being made, but largely has no formal
association with the film. But he mentions being on Turturro's commentary track
for his other writing-directing project, Illuminata, when he was
only 8.
For a 14-year-old, he's well-spoken
and surprisingly mature, with a good memory. He talks intelligently about the
film's motifs and techniques, having learned so much about it from "our many dinners at The
Gingko Leaf, where you were expressing the week's accomplishments." He prompts
his father to discuss particular memories, and reminds him of what he said
about a given scene while writing or shooting it. Often, he even explains
Turturro to himself: "Here comes the continuation of your Samson And Delilah obsession. You love that
movie, and you love the story. You can't get enough of that." His sentences
often begin with "Do you want to tell the story about…" or "Do you want to talk
about…"
Turturro is far pettier in his focus
on nuts and bolts. He spends a lot of time praising his sequences and talking
about what family members or friends appear in them, what the characters are
thinking, how the scene compares to the storyboards, what happened during
filming, and how great everybody was. He frequently explains what his
producers, the Coen brothers, thought about given scenes. (They generally loved
them.) He's so caught up in the viewing experience that he tends to talk in
incomplete sentences and trail off, whereupon Amadeo jumps in to prompt him to
complete his thoughts.
At times, though, they devolve
entirely into a close, almost brotherly personal relationship. At one point,
they giggle hysterically over an exaggeratedly accented line from a fantasy
sequence that got cut, and they each repeat it over and over: "You keel me, beetch!"
Later, during a hugely overplayed sex scene between James Gandolfini and Kate
Winslet, Turturro says, "Instead of me having a father-son talk with Amadeo
about sex, I figured I'd just show him this scene, and then he'd figure it out
for himself. He's 14, so that's enough. But he's going to see this stuff
eventually, so what are you gonna do?" Amadeo laughs and says that Turturro
normally "talks about really disgusting things," but is attempting to sound
serious and "so very responsible" because he knows he's being taped.
The duo's cutest, most familial moment probably
comes when Amadeo abruptly says "His hat is
great, Steve [Buscemi]'s hat." John: "I been using that, actually, for my
rehearsals. Do you want that hat?" "It's a great hat. It's awesome." "I'll get
it. It would fit you." "I would love that." "Okay, I'll get it for you."
"Thanks." "Yeah."
What went wrong: Turturro never references
the difficulty of getting the film made, or (very briefly, and two years later)
to theaters; he's entirely positive about the experience. He does say he wanted
to insert a lot more songs—more than 25—but then he found out how
expensive it was to get the clearances for well-known numbers, so he cut back
to "about one every 10 pages." "Piece Of My Heart" was particularly hard to get
the rights for; Turturro says he "had to beg, on my knees and then on my
stomach."
Similarly, when Turturro abruptly cuts to a
bizarre fantasy segment featuring Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, and other cast
members in Samson And Delilah costumes, he says it was supposed to be a clip
from the film, but "we couldn't get it, they wouldn't give it to us. Instead, I
think this was really better… It's my answer to Gladiator. I think that's what Gladiator lacked, actually. It
didn't have enough cheese. There was not enough cheese on that pizza."
Comments on the cast: Turturro on
star James Gandolfini: "You really need someone like James, who can be real and big
and human and do things, and then you can forgive him for 'em, because he's got
a real human quality." Later, he adds that Gandolfini "has got a very
interesting quality, almost a femininity to him. Interesting. He's wonderful
acting opposite a woman, because he really acts with them, and he just has good
chemistry with every woman he worked with in the film. With guys, too, but he's
exceptional with girls. With the ladies."
Turturro on Kate Winslet, during a scene in which she
dances around in a short skirt and bra, vigorously shaking her assets: "And those are her
breasts. She was breastfeeding at the time. Those are her breasts. Those are
real." "There's definitely a clip of you showing her how to do the dance. You
were very into that, like you wanted to show people exactly what you wanted."
"I redid a lot of this dance. That was my idea, this jump onto the bed."
Turturro on Mandy Moore: "Mandy has a natural naiveté
to her which she hasn't lost completely, and that brings a lot to someone who's
supposed to be a young girl. If she's too knowing, then she wouldn't be going
out with [Bobby Cannavale's character] Fryburg."
"I dunno." "Though I'd go out with him." "You see the attractiveness in Fryburg, completely."
Turturro on Christopher Walken: "Chris is really, as John
Malkovich says, [Purring, lisping Malkovich imitation.] He'th the greatetht
existential actor in America. In the world!'"
Inevitable dash of pretension: Discussing the
protagonists' tall-grass-lined back yard, Turturro Sr. says it has a "Nights
Of Cabiria kind of feeling, they're at the edge of nowhere… I just thought
it was really eloquent." He compares the crude sexual language to Charles
Bukowski's poetry, and repeatedly brings up the inspiration of William
Eggleston's photographs. One particularly mannered scene where Moore and
Sarandon babble incoherently over each other, he says was "written like a
song," without explaining. A shot with one person in the foreground and another
in the background is called "kind of Kurosawa." Finally, he sums up the entire
project as "Charles Bukowski writes The Honeymooners, with music.
It's real, you know?"
Commentary in a nutshell: Turturro: "The style of the film… [Laughs.]
It's its own style, don't you think?" Amadeo: "It's almost your kind of thing
that you tried to do in Illuminata, it's almost like that sort of selective scenes
in it, and you took that idea of going into a fantasy, but you don't really.
It's a serious moment, and you're trying to escape it, because you can't, you
have no other means." "That's right."