Don Shanahan
Most folks scrolling by Nonnas on Netflix this weekend will see Vince Vaughn front and center as the headliner and have a moment of memory to ask themselves, “Gosh, when was the last time I’ve seen Vince Vaughn in a movie?” For most who keep their pulse on cinema, the answer is probably five years ago with his surprise 2020 horror-comedy hit Freaky alongside rising star Kathryn Newton. They might tap on his bio next, see that Vince is now 55 years old, and then ask what does he have left?
If they ask that presumptive question about one of the guys with the best gifts of gab in the history of the business, they’ll already know that Vince Vaughn has plenty left. With hopeful health, that man will spit game until he’s old and gray, and we’ll love him for his eternal spryness to the very end. However, audiences finding Nonnas shouldn’t be targeting Vince. They should be asking that question of the four performers embodying the titular characters of the dramedy movie instead.
They’ll find the sterling senior lineup of Lorraine Bracco, Susan Sarandon, Talia Shire, and Brenda Vaccaro. Those four ladies comprise the true core of the movie. With ages ranging from 70 to 85, they share nine career Academy Award nominations—and one win—between them. That’s nine more than Vince, but they have all reached a stage of their careers where meaningful offers and plum parts don’t come around all that often. You might have even flat out forgotten some of them. Yet, if those same Netflix surfers stop and ask what do they have left, they’ll watch Nonnas and arrive at the same answer: PLENTY
When the middle-aged Brooklynite and public transportation depot worker Joe Scaravella (Vaughn) loses his mother, the loss hits him in his stomach as much as his heart. Long ago, he was the type of kid who grew up in the kitchen more than in the garage with the other boys. As seen in soft flashbacks, Joe marveled at his beautiful mother and grandmother (Kate Eastman and Karen Giordano, respectively) cooking big family meals on Sundays. In the years since with his own skill set, he’s never been able to successfully reproduce the magic of most of the old immigrant recipes of his family’s and others.
Wanting to do something about that and honor his mother’s memory, Joe sinks his inheritance, limited savings, and life insurance payout into impulsively buying a shuttered Italian restaurant on Staten Island. Scaravella convinces his contractor best friend Bruno (Magic Mike series member Joe Manganiello) and his designer wife Stella (TV star Drea de Matteo) to refurbish the place from the studs into something new. His fanciful business plan is to create a restaurant where “nonnas”–-old grandmothers—are the chefs, leaning on the dream that more people than just him long for a kind of bygone, ethnic homemade cooking that’s slowly fading with passing generations.
This is when Joe—and Nonnas—enlists our aforementioned matrons to open Enoteca Maria. Roberta (Bracco) and Gia (Sarandon) are friends of Joe’s mother, where Roberta is wallowing in a nursing home estranged from family and Gia runs her own beauty salon. Teresa (Shire) answers a Craigslist ad looking for nonnas after leaving the convent. The final chef is Antonella (Vaccaro), the grandmother of Joe’s old prom date, Olivia (Linda Cardellini), whom he’s reconnected with while visiting Staten Island for the project.
Between the four, each has different roots, some of which clash, personally and in the culinary department, making for some surly hijinks in Nonnas. Yet, they all agree with Joe’s vision and the chance to share their stories through their bequeathed dishes. There’s a great scene in the middle of Nonnas where Sarandon gives the other three fresh cuts and makeovers for opening night, and the film stays exclusively on them. Through a sum of quality time and a strong bottle of limoncello, a shared conversation unfurls where they share their origins, flaws, and hopes with each other. Before this cooking opportunity, they felt insignificant and discarded, and now they don’t.
With frankness and heart, the collected actresses show precisely why this film is rightfully theirs more than Vaughn’s. The movie, directed by empathy specialist Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Wonder, Dear Evan Hansen) and written by his wife Liz Maccie (TV’s Siren), wins you over at that pre-climactic get-together for the rest of the movie. Even if it’s been far too long to remember and appreciate the likes of Rocky and The Godfather’s Talia Shire, The Sopranos’s Lorraine Bracco, or the long-lost Brenda Vaccaro, last scene in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and fifty years after her Oscar nomination for Once is Not Enough, watching them interact is like they never left. Poetically, like a line of dialogue in the film, “Great things stand the test of time.”
The majority of Nonnas’s running time is spent on the manufactured suspense encompassing Joe’s side as the owner trying to get the establishment off the ground. Scaravella’s ordeal dealing with deadlines, bills, inspections, promotional failings, absent food critics (represented by Campbell Scott), and miffed local pushback (led by Michael Rispoli) match many of the pitfalls from the true story of the actual Enoteca Maria (which still stands and serves international food to this day). Vaughn, brightened by the patiently delivered romantic potential of Linda Cardellini’s presence, keeps those strings of failures optimistic and endearing.
Yet, all the while, we find ourselves pining to spend more time with the venerable ladies in Nonnas. They deserve a happy ending as much as Joe, and both history and the movie grant them a lovely one. With a marinade of humor and a dash of spiritual Catholic contrition, Chbosky and Maccie find the meaningful meat behind the fluff for a welcome crowd pleaser. Come hungry and leave full, with Billy Joel appropriately sending you out.
