Mafia Mamma (2023)

Mafia Mamma review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

Mafia Mamma's enjoyment depends entirely on how confident you are that Toni Collette can carry any movie. I’ve you’ve ever watched her in films like Hereditary or Knives Out and thought to yourself, “I could watch her in anything,” well, this is the movie to put that to the ultimate test. Here, Colette leads a film all about a woman who finds herself in a silly plot of stumbling into the world of Italian mobsters when all she really wants is the Eat Pray Love European experience. The plot could easily descend straight to video with a lesser-known actress.

What makes this film mostly work is the performance of Toni Collette. She plays Kristen, a woman whose life is in tatters. Her husband is a lazy mooch who is cheating on her, and a patriarchal environment undermines her job as a marketing writer. Colette plays up this type of character with the same level of manic terror that, oddly enough, works for this type of comedy. Her expressive face and tendencies to overreact with overarching humor are pretty stellar, especially for the scene where she’s shocked by her husband cheating but somehow makes small talk with the other woman between tears. Watching her during these scenes is like watching her make lemonade from stones.

But a little of that goes a long way in a film where she’s meant to play the dopey American tripping all over Italy. She ventures off to the country when she discovers her grandfather has died and that she needs to attend the funeral for an inheritance. She assumes her grandfather was in charge of wine production when he was actually a mafia Don. Kristen learns this hard when she attends the funeral and is immediately met with gunfire from a rival mafia. She screams as bullets fly and tries to make sense of her current situation. Ultimately, the story is less about her having a mafia adventure and more about growing a backbone amid people who want to shoot at her.

There are some earnest attempts to inject some extra levels of absurdity and wish fulfillment. Kristen swoons over the handsome Fabrizio (Eduardo Scarpetta), who is sexy enough for a fling until she cannot trust him. The mafia’s lawyer, Bianca (Monica Bellucci), is solid in convincing Kristen to pursue crime and has an okay running gag of a fake leg. I also loved the comedic support of Kristen’s friend Jenny (Sophia Nomvete), who is so uproarious that even the rest of the characters must applaud her for belting out a tune to take advantage of the acoustics in a big courtroom. The rest of the mafia characters, however, more or less come off like cartoon characters in this plot of rival mafias all fighting for who gets the biggest slice of the pizza pie.

I admired the spirit of Mafia Mamma, even if it does run out of steam the further it goes along. The film is more impressive for how well Toni Collette can commit to this script and rarely phones in what could’ve been a vacation movie, where she half-heartedly spits out some lines and then takes off to drink and eat cheese. She has undoubtedly earned that refreshment with this film, even if she’s mostly strolling through a film that treats her as a clumsy bumbler for most of the picture. It’s a passive dose of comedy for those who enjoy stuff like Eat Pray Love or Under The Tuscon Sun but want some shootouts and comical outbursts laced throughout. It’s a rainy-day watch, preferably with wine and cheese, which will probably make the ho-hum script go down smoother.