Movie review: MAC
directed by John Turturro

“Mac” begins with low angle shots of laborers laying concrete in the rain. They slog through the mud, push wheel barrels over the uneven ground of the construction site, and smooth the concrete as the rain pelts tiny round creators in the surface of the wet cement.

This is the world of “Mac,” Niccolo Vitelli (John Turturro), and his two brothers, Vico (Michael Badalucco) and Bruno (Carl Capotoro). We soon find out that the legacy of that world has been left by the three brothers’ father, a skilled carpenter, whose funeral they attend in the opening scenes of the film and who, in one of the most striking moments of the film, speaks to them from the coffin. He tells them about the value of work. For him, work was labor of love, not done for money, but for pride and honor.

This is a story told with irony and humor about the values of the older Italian immigrant generation. Turturro plays Mac, the oldest son of the deceased father. The setting is Queens, New York, in 1954. Turturro, who both wrote and directed the film, recreates in extraordinary realistic detail, the lives of the laboring class of Italian Americans during this period in the boroughs of New York City.

It was a time when inner-city people, African-American and immigrants, lived together. Their knowledge and respect for each other was based on the strength of their backs and their dedication to their work. Racial slurs abound among the men when they became angry with each other, but their racist epithets are ultimately overridden by their work ethic, the common bond that links them all together in their struggle to survive.

Much of the humor of the film is derived from this less than genteel side of working-class life that Mac and his two brothers inhabit. On the job one day, an Irish worker lashes out at Mac. He calls him a wop and a supporter of Mussolini. The brawl that ensues after Mac pulls down the scaffolding the Irish man is on, is one among many comic scenes in the film. The working stiffs take time from their job to blow off steam and pummel each other with fists and boards. Moments later they are having lunch together, convivial and, if not good friends, ready to cooperate in their collective endeavor of working and feeding their families.

The man they all work for is the unscrupulous Polish immigrant, Polowski. He is a crook who forces his work crews to build substandard houses. He is the antithesis of Mac’s deceased and honorable father. Polowski requires the men to cut corners in their framing. When he demands this of Mac, in rage Mac tears out the studs from the house they are building and is fired.

As an aspiring artisan following in the footsteps of his father, Mac strikes out on his own as a contractor. He takes his two brothers and Nat (John Amos), an African American carpenter on their crew, with him. Unfortunately, Mac, to his younger brothers’ chagrin and ultimate alienation, demands high standards in their work and uncompromising dedication to their partnership.

One brother, Bruno, aspires to be an artist, a profession not far removed from the work of his artisan father. But unlike his father and his older brother, he is indiscriminate, given to lewd encounters with strange women on the subway’s. The other brother, Vico is something of a carouser. On one occasion he is out all night with Oona (Ellen Barkin), the quintessential Beatnik-hipster from the 1950s, who intrigues the lower-class Italian boy from Queens with her suave beauty and universalist, gibberish philosophy.

As a result, on the following day Vico, because of his fatigue, causes Nat to fall from a roof and seriously injures himself. This only increases the tension between the two younger brothers and Mac.

The humor of the film abounds in nearly every scene. The widowed Mrs. Vitelli, the three brothers’ mother, remains an unseen but demanding, screaming presence throughout the film. (She is not an image of Italian motherhood that would be approved of by Italian mother’s of any generation.)

Mac marries a women, Alice (Katherine Borowitz) with whom he is compatible. He proposes to her one evening, and she offers him four thousand dollars to help finance his first construction job. Appropriate to their station in life, they embrace in the front seat of Mac’s battered pickup truck as the rain pours in though the holes in the roof.

The first four houses they build are on a plot of land bounded on one side by an insane asylum and a noisy, malodeous, defecating heard of cows on the other. Mac’s ability to victimize himself, because of his impetuosity and emotionalism, is the basis of much of the film’s humor.

Polowski reappears in Mac’s life, pretending to befriend his old nemesis, but bent only upon swindling him. The fight that occurs when Mac discovers Polowski’s scheme is a moment first of terror, and then of high comedy. At the end of the mauling, clutching, scratching, biting, kicking fight between the two men, Mac leaves the Polish contractor sprawled out on the earth with his pants torn off and his hairy posterior exposed. The flawed human condition in Turturro’s excellent script is revealed in nearly every scene.

For a first time director, Turturro is in control of his long script throughout the film. The many low angle and tight shots that he directs creates a rhythm and tension in the film that complements the often emotionally charged action. The density of the realistic detail, depicting the lower middle-class life of the 1950's, including the small cramped apartments in which much of the action occurs, is often shot in tightly framed scenes.

The closeness of the family network, including the lives of the three brothers, is represented well in the cluttered nearly claustrophobic living conditions of the Vitelli family. It is little wonder that the three brothers are so close: they ate ans slept together, and in a house with only one bathroom, privacy was simply unheard of in their family life.

In the end, it is just this closeness that drives the brothers apart. Bruno and Vico grow resentful of Mac’s total control of them and complete access to their personal lives. Ultimately, in a bitter parting of ways, they demand their money from the partnership and leave.

At one level, Mac’s megalomanic drive for protection is about money. The great American dream of all immigrants who came to America was to be successful. But Mac’s great ambitions and volatile nature cut two ways: he needed to make money but he never intended to compromise those standards of excellence represented by his father. His first four houses and the quality of workmanship that he put into them were monuments to his father and his old world values. His single-mindedness drove his brothers away.

Perhaps, such a wish, Turturro is saying, is vain in contemporary America, that assimilation is the only route open to future generations of Italian Americans and other ethnic groups. But Turturro dramatizes well that at least we can remember the values of the past, however difficult it may be to continue to apply them in contemporary America.

Kenneth Scambray

 

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