Review: Nonnas

Directed by: Stephen Chbosky

Written by: Liz Maccie

Starring: Vince Vaughn, Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire, Brenda Vaccaro, Joe Manganiello

Rating: [3.5/5]

Nothing can quite beat a home-cooked meal by a grandmother. Decades of cooking experience, tinkering of recipes, and mastery of flavors allows for a combination that remains unmatched. This carries across various cultures, as the love poured into food by grandmothers for their families adds an irreplaceable element to it. Capitalizing this into an idea for a restaurant would appear to be a slam-dunk, but as seen in Nonnas, not all things come easy when operating in an area where tradition matters above all else. 

Following the passing of his mother, Joe (Vince Vaughn) finds the best way to manage the grief involves recreating his mother’s recipes. Encouraged by his friends to use the insurance money for something positive in his life, Joe decides to open a restaurant in Staten Island, all in honor of his late mother. While a noble dream, he faces plenty of resistance. 

The failure rate of restaurants as a business is widely known for various reasons, including the upfront and ongoing costs and the fairly thin margins involved. It makes it reasonable to question anyone who decides to open up a restaurant, especially in cases like this film where the protagonist does not know the first thing of operating one. Nothing about Joe’s idea makes sense other than the potential of the aforementioned special sauce at the center of his film: the allure of a cooked meal by grandmothers. 

With these grandmothers involved. We get plenty of comedy centering on what one would imagine Italian grandmother jokes would look like. In this film, we get plenty of jokes about who makes the best ragù between these grandmothers as they try to solidify themselves as the best cook in the kitchen. Plenty of cattiness between them, but this element mostly works because of the wonderful women gathered to portray these characters. We have the always-appreciated Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire, Brenda Vaccaro, and Susan Sarandon as this lovely quartet of chefs. They each have their distinct personalities and also bring the heartwarming features this film wants to accentuate. Seeing the likes of Bracco and Shire was so refreshing, seeing as they likely do not have many roles written for them, but here they get the opportunity to shine.

While having the fun of the older ladies in the kitchen, Joe must contend with the realities of running a restaurant with limited funds. Then we have the outright rejection by the Staten Island locals because they see Joe building this restaurant as some infraction against them, for reasons we find out later. A mixture of elements that does bode well for the success of a restaurant with the odds stacked against it from the start. It therefore makes sense why the conflict brewing between Joe and his best friend, Bruno (Joe Manganiello). As much as we root for Joe, Bruno lives in reality as he continually tries to bring his friend down to the Earth on why opening this restaurant perhaps is not the best idea. 

Having all of this in mind, the true beauty of this film lies in Joe battling his grief and how opening this restaurant in memory of his mother means more than the financial prospects of a successful business venture. He has this ongoing journey of recreating the sauce his mother made for him since childhood, which compounds with this restaurant dream to craft something that will ultimately help him receive a level of closure nothing else will fulfill. Vince Vaughn deserves so much credit for the work he does here as Joe, where he can utilize his usual style of comedy but also digging into some beautifully emotional moments. He shares these with pretty much all the characters in the film and going through this journey with Joe, especially in the way the film concludes, ensures we receive an emotionally cathartic experience. 

Admittedly, going into my viewing of Nonnas, I did not have high expectations, but this film little film surprised me. Yes, it has the comedy one would expect with the premise involved, but it packs such an emotional punch. It speaks to the beauty of family, community, and never losing touch with those that came before that allows many of its shortcomings to feel not as important.