‘Married to the Mob’ or — Ruehl Rules?

Is it somewhat churlish to criticise a film for being too easy-going and enjoyable? I guess so, but let’s do it anyway and I’ll happily take the blame.

‘Married to the Mob’ (1988) is an excellent reminder of just how good a director Jonathan Demme could be at his best, and that seemingly spontaneous energy he brought to ‘Stop Making Sense’ (1984), ‘Something Wild’ (1986) and ‘Swimming to Cambodia’ (1987) is in full flow in this tale about a murdered gangster’s wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) attempting to distance herself from the mob in order to start a new life as a hairdresser. There’s a hilariously irresistible gaudiness to it all yet that sparkling effortlessness belies the fact that there’s also some seriously impressive filmmaking going on here (watch the film’s opening hit for proof of that).

Colour, sound, music and tone are merged with remarkable ease to the extent that you can almost feel the film getting high on its own blithe hipness… and that’s where the potential problem arises because it frequently threatens to tip over into the smug.

This is best represented by Matthew Modine’s FBI agent who seems to have mistaken aggressively quirky for charmingly smooth, something not helped by the fact that his actions are explicitly reprehensible when viewed outside the forgiving lens of a screwball comedy. He’s nothing more than a spiky explosion of jagged mugging when he should’ve been agreeably enticing, almost as though working with Stanley Kubrick the previous year had built up a vast backlog of pent-up jocularity within the poor guy and it’s now all gushing out in one giant, uncontrollable burst.

This threatens to work against the material because, as Martin Brest knew for ‘Midnight Run’ (1988), this type of comedy doesn’t need coquettishly affected quirk but blue-collar crass, so thank god for Mercedes Ruehl who’s available to ferociously grab the film by the scruff of the neck (“Just give me the fucking ticket, dickhead!”).

She cuts through Demme’s pastel breeziness like a shellac stiletto, a tornado of expletives and hairspray who blows everyone in her immediate vicinity off the bloody screen whenever she appears. She’s fantastic.

The only person capable of withstanding her power is Dean Stockwell’s mob boss, Tony “The Tiger”, who gives an Oscar nominated performance as icily cool as his honeymoon suite’s decor along with a brief monologue about cheeseburgers so skilfully natural it convinced me I might prefer this movie to ‘Pulp Fiction’ (1994). I also suspect Demme’s film might be the better directed.

‘Married to the Mob’ is in possession of a highly appealing spirit with genuine heart so any missteps it might make in its enthusiasm to entertain (how dare a Hollywood comedy have the audacity to be pleasurable!) are minor quibbles. My only real complaint is I wish Stockwell and Ruehl had been the main characters instead of Pfeiffer and Modine. But that’s just me being greedy. And I’m happy to take the blame for that, too.