Romance & Cigarettes (2005)

Romance & Cigarettes (John Turturro, 2005)
Walken plays: Cousin Bo - florist, cuckold, Tom Jones harmonizer



Synopsis: Romance & Cigarettes is exactly the kind of bonkers film you'd expect to see directed by John Turturro method acting as his iconic Jesus from The Big Lebowski. Except, thankfully, with fewer eight year olds, dude. It's outrageously zany, campy as all get out, crashes between farce and seriousness with wild abandon, and full of unbridled emotions, as the characters scream out a fantastic tracklist of pop hits alongside the originals (perpetuating the 'singing in the shower' aesthetic of Woody Allen's rather delightful Everyone Says I Love You). Plot-wise, it's a ensemble treatise to lust, as the volcanic Kitty (Susan Sarandon) finds the poem her working class mug of a husband (James Gandolfini) has written to his sex-addict mistress Tula (Kate Winslet)'s... err, nether region. Cue lots of singing, lots of character actor cameos, and lots of wanton fetishizing of the female form, or isolated attributes of it, to be specific, as the cast, particularly Steve Buscemi, are all careful to explain, at length, which body parts they're obsessed with. Classy.



Walken Walkens so hard here as Kitty's Cousin Bo that you almost get the sense that Turtorro asked him to do an impression of himself. He's here as a support for her as she sifts through Gandolfini's affair, but takes the opportunity to vocalize his own romantic trauma... by belting out a very literal music video to Tom Jones' "Delilah", betrayal and murder and all (though Turturro's keeping the original vocals playing, forcing Walken to murmur along with Jones, rather letting rip with his own version, is intensely frustrating). At times, Walken's pantomime histrionics are so over-the-top that it's almost too much even for the most dedicated fans. Thankfully, he's careful to allow glimmers of genuine, heartfelt sadness to cross his face, demonstrating how his patriarchal outbursts are born from a place of real hurt, making Bo surprisingly sympathetic amongst his thrashing and yodelling.

Wacky Walken dialogue: Explaining his paradoxical mix of lust and parental slut-shaming when seeing young girls in thongs to Susan Sarandon would seem leerier if Walken didn't burst out with "I wanna BUZZ YOUR BUTT!" like a Tourettes tic halfway through... then asking his flower shop customer, who's been patiently waiting to pay, "Am I right?" His calm calling out "I'm qualified to satisfy ya" to a belly dancer(?) at the cafe he and Sarandon are dining at, or informing her that he expressed his love to his ex by "trac[ing] her name in cow shit" are pretty enjoyably nuts as well.



DOES HE DANCE: It's more manic zombie flailing than dancing, but considering how batshit the rest of the film is, I'll count it. He also gets to knife-dance-fight with a cabal of cops, which is pretty cool.

Overall Walken-o-meter: 8/10 cowbells. Turturro playing Walken for such broad wackiness is tremendously fun, but feels like a bit of a waste of potential. Still, he works his few honest emotional moments like nobody's business. If only Turturro had muted that gosh darn Tom Jones and just let Walken have at it, though. Forgive me Chris-to-pher, I just couldn't take any mooooooooooore.