Saying 'I Do' Never Sounded So Crude

Probably, you've got to be a second- or third-generation Italian-American from Queens to properly appreciate "Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding," the long-running off-Broadway show now brought to the silver screen by Roger Paradiso. At any rate I could not and, apart from a few chuckles, found it woefully unfunny.

Though the film was made more than three years ago, it is only now finding a commercial release, thanks to the IFC Center. The theatrical original was an improvisational work in which the members of the audience were treated as guests at the eponymous wedding. Mr. Paradiso's version purports to be a wedding video by the gay Hispanic film student Raphael (Guillermo Díaz), whose camera always seems to be in the wrong place at the right time. This accounts for the quasi-cinéma vérité look of the film.

The slender peg on which the action is hung is that the bride's mother, Josephina Vitale (Priscilla Lopez), thinks that her darling Tina (Mila Kunis) is marrying beneath her worth by linking her lot to Tony (Joey McIntyre). Though born and raised in the same Queens neighborhood as Tony's family, the Nunzios, Josephina and her late husband, Vito, subsequently moved to the upscale precincts of Massapequa, where the Nunzios look like barbarian invaders.

The father of the groom and family patriarch, "Big Tony" Nunzio (John Fiore) owns a strip club back in Queens called "Animal Kingdom." Loud, coarse and domineering, he is divorced and living with a much younger bimbo-type named Maddy (Krista Allen). He enjoys embarrassing his son in front of his new relations and produces an explosive reaction among the Vitales by offering Little Tony the strip club as a wedding present.

Big Tony insists that Vito, who was killed by being blown off a roof while trying to put up Christmas decorations in a blizzard, "leapt to his doom" on account of his wife. "Anything to get the f--- away from her."

There are several attempts at comic sub-plots. One of Tina's old boyfriends, Michael (Adrian Grenier), turns up and tries to object to the union before being forcibly restrained by the groom's brother, Dominic (Jon Bernthal). Later, he later gets embarrassingly drunk, strips to his underpants, and sits in the wedding cake. It sounds funnier than it is.

Father Mark (Dean Edwards) also gets (less embarrassingly) drunk, as does Sister Clare (Mary Testa), Tina's cousin. Tina's brother Joey (Richard Robichaux) is a closeted homosexual, Tony's brother Johnny (Sebastian Stan) is a half-wit, and the best man, Barry (Matthew Saldivar), is dealing (and smoking) drugs during the reception. Vinnie Black (Richard Portnow), proprietor of a schlock "Coliseum" where the reception is held, is an unfunny comedian.

It will be observed that the movie's own comic invention is not of the most brilliant sort. Wedding movies always get a certain comic mileage out of the contrast between the religious and romantic trappings of the traditional wedding ceremony and the coarseness of the impulses they are meant to sanctify, but coarseness in "Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding" is a way of life and indulged for its own sake.
At one point, Big Tony taunts Josephina, who was briefly his high school sweetheart, by saying: "You puke, you fart, and you f---, just like the rest of us, and you grew up doing it three blocks from my f---ing gutter in Queens."

Something of the same envious desire to drag the audience down to his grossly physical, elemental level is detectable in the movie itself. No "phony" middle-class airs and graces here! When poor, incontinent Uncle Lui (Clement Fowler) tells Raphael's camera, "I don't like to hear women swear," it is as much a joke as when he urinates in the holy water.

We don't get to hear his reaction to the opinion of Connie (Kim Director), the maid of honor until she is demoted in the field, that instead of a man, "a good vibrator, a good dog, and a good cleaning service are all a woman needs." Nor to Barry's best-man speech, which boils down to little more than what he obviously takes to be this compliment: "I never seen two people who were more hot for each other than you two — sorry, sister. You love each other and that's what this f---ing world needs more of."

"Women are beautiful, they are Madonnas, if you know what I mean," says Uncle Lui. But what Mr. Paradiso and company suppose he means is only that he is hopelessly imprisoned by an old-world courtliness that amounts to nothing more than pretension.

In the new world, one of the bridesmaids means something quite different when she says to Tina: "You look like Madonna, I swear to God!" It's sad to see the richness of Italian culture reduced to this level of vulgarity.

jbowman@nysun.com

Friday and Saturday at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771).