Big Night is one of the great movies about food and family. Two brothers have moved from Italy to Atlantic City in the 1950s to open the restaurant they have always dreamed of. Unfortunately for them, they are having a hard time finding people to share their dreams. The answer: to throw a party for everyone they know to show off how to make dreams a reality.
This movie is funny and sensual. It is touching and angry. It talks about art and bankruptcy in both the moral and financial sense.
The older brother Primo, is the genius chef. He knows and can explain precisely why some foods go with each other and they some should never be out together. His food is high art and needs people to appreciate his art. His brother, Secondo, understands his genius and is left with the unenviable job of translating his genius to the few customers who come in the door who want spaghetti and meatballs.
While Primo lives in his idealistic world, Secondo lives in the here and now. His mentor runs the successful restaurant across the street. That restaurant aims for the lowest common denominator. The owner put on a show for all his customers. The food is all very basic, very simple; requiring no effort or appreciation for the chefs or the customers.
Secondo confides to his mentor and competitor that the bank won’t lend them anymore money. He is frustrated that he cannot bridge the gap between his brother’s artistic success and his friend’s financial success. The answer is proposed that his mentor will invite Jazz legend Louis Prima to Primo and Secondo’s restaurant. They will throw a big party for him, invite everyone they know and the local press. They can then build off the notice that the visit will bring and voila, they will have their successful restaurant.
His brother Primo, while supremely confident in his artistic powers, is extremely self confident in his lack of ability to communicate to others without his brother. He thinks he is in love with the woman who sells the restaurant flowers, but cannot work up the courage to ask her out on a date. Even with his friends in the neighboring barber shop, he can’t discuss his fears and frustrations. His only source of communication is through food.
Primo manages to work up the courage to invite the local flower seller. Secondo invites his fiancée, his mistress (and wife of his mentor), along with everyone else they can think of.
The feast they create takes all of the money they have left in the bank. In the kitchen, they speak to each other in the language of food and they begin to share that language with those that they love. The feast they produce will make you hunger for Italian specialties you’ve never dreamed of and suspect you will never find.
The party goes from loud raucous fun to moments of quiet magic; from shared communal joy to individual anger and pity. It has everything you want in a party.
Every character, major and minor, is a fully fleshed out individual, not a shorthand or stereotype. This movie shows the transformative power of high art. Art, not only as a movie, not only as a feast, but as how life should be lived.