Lorraine Bracco and Talia Shire in Nonnas | Jeong Park/Netflix
The new Netflix film, which is based on a true story, is chock-full of Italian restaurant tropes. But its delicious cast helps it go down easy.
There are so many movie tropes that center around Italian restaurants. You’re likely conjuring some at this very moment — red checkered tablecloths, heaping plates of spaghetti and meatballs, overflowing red wine glasses. Perhaps you see Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub arguing while making timpano in Big Night, or the pasta-laden plates of Vesuvio, the restaurant operated by Artie Bucco in The Sopranos. Whatever iconic images come to mind, you’ll find echoes of them in Nonnas, the new Stephen Chbosky film based on Enoteca Maria, a real-life restaurant on Staten Island.
Named for the late mother of founder Jody Scaravella, the real Enoteca Maria has been charming critics and diners alike since opening in 2007. The premise is simple: a rotating cast of grandmothers cook specialties from their hometowns. At present, the restaurant employs more than two dozen nonnas hailing from Italy, France, Ecuador, Bangladesh, and Syria, among other locales. In the film, though, the restaurant’s “nonnas around the world” concept instead focuses on the fiery Italian personalities of Roberta (Lorraine Bracco), Gia (Susan Sarandon), Antonella (Brenda Vaccaro), and Teresa (Talia Shire).
From its first moments, it’s clear that this is a film about food. Every classic Italian-American food cliche — the eternal “sauce or gravy” debate, pignoli cookies piled high on a holiday table — mouth-wateringly parades across the screen. In Nonnas, food is as much a vehicle for nostalgia as it is for love and grief. When Joe Scaravella (Vince Vaughn) thinks back to his childhood in the 1960s, his plates are abundant and vibrant. Now, sitting at his mother’s funeral as an adult, the only plate in front of him is his least favorite pasta.
Vaughn is believable as the slightly dopey Scaravella, who opens the restaurant as a way to reconnect with his late mother. He enlists Bruno (Joe Manganiello), his lifelong best friend, to build Enoteca Maria, and immediately it becomes clear that Joe hasn’t fully thought this plan out. “What is there to know about opening a restaurant,” he wonders, full of hubris. “You make food, people eat food, you make people happy.”
The way that Nonnas portrays the challenges of restaurant ownership veers sharply away from the realistic, high-intensity vibe of shows like The Bear. It is much more into the tedium than the typical film, but at its heart, is more a romantic love letter to Italian American cuisine and the women who cook it. It relies heavily on the stereotypes that Goodfellas and Big Night have established about how food fuels and comforts loud, boisterous Italian American families. But even when they’re a little bit cloying, this constant trope parade — Sicilians fighting Italians from other regions over regional differences, grandmothers shoving plates toward grievers at a funeral — mostly lands with charismatic effect.
Emotional weight aside, the film’s most compelling moments come when its four lead actresses are allowed to cook. The nonnas are all fiercely opinionated and hail from different Italian regions, so naturally they have different opinions about the menu. There’s so much good cranky grandma humor in these scenes, as Roberta (Bracco) complains about the other women in her retirement home and Antonella (Vaccaro) tries to fix Joe up with Olivia (Linda Cardellini), the girl he totally screwed it up with back in high school. That energy culminates in a very funny food fight between the two, and honestly, this film earns its existence by giving us the opportunity to watch Lorraine Bracco bat away garlic bulbs with a giant baguette.
Jeong Park/Netflix
Nonnas is, ultimately, a celebration of older women, one that gives them permission to pursue joy instead of conceding to the years. Sarandon’s character Gia reminds the others in an impassioned speech in her hair salon that, even at their age, beauty is worth celebrating. “Is it our hair, our faces, or bodies?,” she says. “No, it’s a feeling. You feel beautiful when you feel seen, when you feel heard, when you feel strong.” Writer Liz Maccie, who based the nonnas on the grandmothers and friends-of-family and aunts that she grew up around in her own large Italian-American family, does an excellent job of centering — and celebrating — the experiences of these “women of a certain age” who often don’t get the same shine on the screen.
I don’t consider it a spoiler to say the film ends with a happily ever after: Just when Joe considers the whole experiment a bust, the restaurant finally gets a favorable review. Enoteca Maria starts to fill up with customers. The credits roll to the sounds of classical Italian music.
This would all feel a little too neat and tidy, too unrealistic, if it wasn’t based on a true story. And while Scaravella’s experience has almost certainly been punched up, it’s still uniquely cinematic. Of course we want to watch five nonnas cook and fight with each other on screen! Of course it’s impossibly charming to see their beloved recipes finally get the recognition that they deserve. If you can manage to make it through the short featurette about Enoteca Maria’s real-life nonnas without getting misty — it rolls just before the credits — you’re tougher than me.
Ultimately, Nonnas isn’t breaking any ground. It is the latest film in a long lineage that romanticizes Italian cuisine to the point of parody, even though the real story — which centers grandmothers with global experiences — is actually more interesting. It is still, though, a cute little watch, one that will make you very, very hungry.
