For too long Angela has lived in a domestic cage with rococo bars and gilded walls. Her husband Frank "the Cucumber" De Marco (Alec Baldwin) boards the morning Long Island commuter train, but he does his work in transit, putting a bullet in the brain of a rival Mafia goon in the seat ahead of him. Angela has a cute son, but the kid runs a three-card monte game in the backyard. Her home must have been decorated by Wheel of Fortune: all the furniture and appliances are studiously ugly, and half of them are still in crates. As she tells Frank, "Everything we wear, everything we eat, everything we own -- fell off a truck."
So when Frank gets prematurely deceased, courtesy of his jealous capo Tony "the Tiger" Russo (Dean Stockwell), Angela moves to a scuzzy Manhattan flat and makes friends with a nice guy named Mike (Matthew Modine). He's an FBI agent on a Mob detail, but what does this vulnerable widow know? As the camera tiptoes closer, Angela pours out her valentine-on-velvet heart. Tony this, Frank that, life sure does stink. And at the precise intersection of streetwise agony and Method acting -- the very moment at which an actress is expected to secure her Oscar nomination -- Michelle Pfeiffer crosses her eyes.
This goofy gesture, which America's most criminally pretty actress flashes smack in the middle of Jonathan Demme's high, wild and handsome comedy Married to the Mob, is no wink to the cognoscenti. Nor is it the white flag that a leading actress must eventually wave to the cartoon figures -- the Mafia dons and prima donnas -- scampering around her. It is the distress signal of a young woman, once cocooned in marriage, who now sees herself as an adolescent spilling confidences over a two-straw chocolate soda.
Demme is tops at luring these confidences, these comic grace notes, out of his performers. And Pfeiffer knows how to dish them out with the generosity of an haut-monde hostess casting intimate glances at strangers. Both artists have made funky music before -- easy on the ears, with reverberations that jangle provocatively in a moviegoer's memory. But the violent mood swings Demme programmed into films like Melvin and Howard and Something Wild often kept viewers at a bemused remove. And once or twice Pfeiffer has been stuck in films she could ornament but not inform. This time, though, these two and a gang of co-stars have created a coherent farce symphony.
The mobsters here are plodding, put-upon businessmen, and their wives are as bored and possessive as if they lived in Stepford. They are refugees from New York City's orphan boroughs who have disguised themselves as middle-class Long Islanders. And they have brought their gruff camaraderie, their accents and their animosities with them. This is not Jay Gatsby's West Egg (he was a gangster too, but he dressed better); this is New Yawk transplanted, with a lawn and a sauna. For these tough guys, upward mobility carries a hefty price tag: the pretense of a solid marriage. So a sleaze lord like Tony Russo can sign rub-out contracts but can't handle his wife Connie, played to the gritted teeth by Mercedes Ruehl.