In Mafia Mamma, Toni Collette Tries Doing Crimes But Can’t Get Past Mugging

Though gangsters and comedy have a long and productive history of mixing, Mafia Mamma is a particular throwback to the turn of the 21st century, when Warner Bros. goofed on its own history as a purveyor of 1930s and 1940s gangster classics by repeatedly asking, what if someone who wasn’t generally an obvious mafia guy (say, a Billy Crystal, Hugh Grant or Matthew Perry type) was forced to interact with someone steely and potentially murderous (say, a Robert De Niro, James Caan or Bruce Willis type)? And what if, at some point, said gangsters were forced by circumstance or creaky screenplays to act kinda silly in return?

To this formula, Mafia Mamma adds the question: What if that non-gangster type were a lady? And then follows up with a second question: Would this maybe count as doing a feminism? Because the general concept – Kristin (Toni Collette), an unsatisfied woman in her 40s, discovers she is heir to a powerful Italian mafia family – feels like it might have seemed au courant two decades ago, the film mistakes its messaging about gender inequity for, yeesh, rousing satire. That no one actually says “youse go, girl” qualifies as both a miracle and a perverse disappointment.

Kristin’s workaday life is introduced in a series of humiliations that audiences everywhere will hope get better – not necessarily Kristin’s situation, mind, but the jokes and their timing. Faced with a son leaving the nest for college and a cartoonish man-child of a philandering husband, goaded on by her sassy minority bestie Jenny (Sophia Nomvete) who lives only to serve and sometimes say “vagina,” Kristin says yes-and to a surprising phone call about the death of the grandfather she never knew. See, Kristin’s departed mother emigrated to the U.S. from Italy; despite her first-generation-American status, she has never further investigated her heritage, or even, apparently, evinced much interest in her almost-homeland beyond Stanley Tucci’s travel shows. She agrees to attend the funeral, hoping to do her own version of Eat, Pray, Love. Only – get this — Jenny, being, again, a sassy minority character who lives to serve and sometimes say “vagina,” amends it to Eat, Pray, Fuck.

Upon her arrival in Italy, Kristin immediately falls in lust with handsome young pasta-maker Lorenzo (Giulio Corso) and, shortly thereafter, discovers that she is being recruited to run the family business. Longtime family consigliere Bianca (Monica Bellucci) knows more about the ins and outs, but isn’t a family member; fiery-tempered Fabrizio (Eduardo Scarpetta) feels he’s being passed over. Kristin initially hopes to pass the job on to Fabrizio, but with Bianca’s help, she charms and girlbosses her way through negotiations with rival families – and her lifelong dream of winemaking in the country it never occurred to her to visit. Rather than satirize the white-lady nonsense of Eat, Pray, Love or Under the Tuscan Sun or drawing connections between those types of wealth-enabled movies and the macho largesse of gangster epics like The Godfather, the movie simply imitates an empowerment fantasy and dumbs it way down. Kristin spends a lot of time finding out how great she is.