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Romance and Cigarettes **1/2

Directed by John Turturro. With James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Bobby Cannavale, Mandy Moore, Mary-Louise Parker, and Christopher Walken. Distributed by MGM. 1 hour, 55 mins. R (sexuality, profanity). Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse

    by Carrie Rickey | Columnist, Inquirer
    Published 

Directed by John Turturro. With James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Bobby Cannavale, Mandy Moore, Mary-Louise Parker, and Christopher Walken. Distributed by MGM. 1 hour, 55 mins.

R

(sexuality, profanity). Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse

"Two, two things a man should know how to do," insists Nick Murder (James Gandolfini). That's him, the Brooklyn mug, up there welding the bridge that connects his borough, where he lives with his wife, to Manhattan, where he loves with his mistress. The sparks are flying, both from Nick's welding torch and from his loins.

According to the man at the naked and palpitating heart of John Turturro's enjoyable folly Romance and Cigarettes, a man should know how to "Be romantic and smoke his brains out." For his auburn-haired wife, Kitty (Susan Sarandon), Nick should be more romantic with her and not at all with Tula (Kate Winslet), his flame-haired mistress.

In the spirit of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, Turturro's folly is an all-singing, all-dancing fantasia of high-infidelity, set to songs by Janis Joplin, Connie Francis and Tom Jones.

When the inarticulate Nick struggles to express what's in his heart, he lurches into song, wailing along with Engelbert Humperdinck on "Lonely Is a Man Without Love." Ears pricked by Nick's Brooklyn love call, the neighborhood garbagemen circle around him in an impromptu chorus line.

Supported by a superb cast that includes Elaine Stritch, Christopher Walken and Steve Buscemi, Gandolfini is compulsively watchable as the blue-collar Tony Soprano with women trouble. Romance and Cigarettes is lewd and it's lurid and looks to be a lost pop opera, but it has more vitality than anything else out there.

- Carrie Rickey