Too Much Sauce

EVER HAVE TOO MUCH spaghetti at an Italian restaurant? Spaghetti isn't the most glamorous of meals, but it's good solid food. But eat too much of it, and the pasta expands in the stomach till the fork-twister feels like a lead zeppelin.

Macaroni, true to its name, is very much like Mama Leone's spaghetti. The plot starts off solidly enough. Robert Traven (Jack Lemmon) is an American exec on a business trip in Naples, where he had a tour of duty during the Second World War. The stressful monotony of his job has forced him to forget those younger, happier days, until his old friend Antonio (Marcello Mastroianni), intrudes on Robert's busy schedule to remind him of old times. Says Antonio to Robert, "Youva become arid, lika desert." Thus begins Antonio's program of re-hydration.

The only problem for Robert is that Antonio has been writing letters in Robert's name to his ex-girlfriend for the past forty years. These letters paint an incredibly heroic portrait of the mild-mannered American, a portrait that not only grossly exceeds his present stature, but mocks his past life of underachievement. Admidst the idolatry of Antonio's friends and family, Traven feels all the more insignificant.

BUT MORTALS OFTEN BECOME what they pretend to be, and pretty soon Traven's hero role acquires a more comfortable fit. When Antonio's friends demand that he play the piano, an instrument he hasn't mastered, Robert plays like a Carnegie Hall veteran. And when Antonio's son gets in trouble with the mob, it's Robert who has to take on the underworld single-handed. Pretty soon even his cold, business-like secretary is getting all gushy about Robert.

The performances by Lemmon and Mastroianni are solid but not overwhelming. Lemmon's style of acting is so familiar as to be monotonous, like canned spaghetti, and Mastroianni comes nowhere near to being the wild Italian he is advertised as. Instead, he resembles the meatball on Lemmon's noodles.

Perhaps this film is a metaphor for the myth of the triumphant post-war America, and the subsequent disillusionment that left Americans feeling "arid." Perhaps the Old Country is sending us a message to renew our strength by returning to a simpler lifestyle, and then renew our striving for our old ideals. Perhaps Robert Traven represents the hero of our own lives that we were all meant to be. And, perhaps, this is all a bit much.

Yes, this film lays the sauce on thick. Cheap melancholy violin strains, again a la Mama Leone's, drip over each scene, happy or sad. All things Italian are overdone like a microwaved lasagna. Wild emotional responses ooze over the stock stereotypical Italian characters we've come to be bored with over the years, such as the psychic grandmother and--could you have guessed--the mob. And the ending drags on like a meal of wet noodles. Beginning to feel indigestion yet?

Granted, like Mama Leone's, this movie has a certain Old World "charm." But I probably would have felt better about Macaroni if I waited to see it on cable. After all, homecooked Italian meals always wind up tasting superior and costing much less.