Romance & Cigarettes

After 2 long years, Romance & Cigarettes has finally been released, by director John Turturro himself, and it's been playing at the Film Forum here in New York.
Pennypacker has never been one for musicals. The idea of breaking out into song in a brief suspension of reality always struck me as a bit stupid, even in good musicals. Little Shop of Horrors pretty much stands alone as the only musical this writer truly likes without any hesitation. And so that record remains after seeing Romance & Cigarettes but that isn't to say this is a bad film. This movie is neither bad or good, it just sort of is. It exists in its own bizarre alternative reality and so it exists as such in our world. Using unoriginal song material, and using original recordings of said material for the actors to sing along to, works out more than it bombs but this is irrelevant as the movie is overtaken by its strange, offbeat non-musical scenes. The dialog and delivery hover somewhere between a Broadway show and someone's dream. The story may take place in Queens, it may have construction workers and housewives and mothers but it's not the Queens we know, or the Queens we would know in a standard old-fashioned musical. There is an unwavering, unflinching sense of weirdness, of surrealism, throughout the entire picture. It doesn't feel real for one second.
Perhaps the most notable feature is the un-sexy-sexiness or sexy-un-sexiness of the film. Is Kate Winslet (back in glorious redhead, as she should always be) incredibly hot? Or is her character rather ugly, unattractive, and repulsive? Or both? And why is she Scottish?
Sure, one could also talk about whether Gandolfini breaks away from, or further steeps himself into, the grip of Tony Soprano. And about whether Christopher Walken was perfect or terrible. But there is a more important question: Why were Mary-Louise Parker and Aida Turturro cast as Gandolfini and Susan Sarandon's daughters? Mandy Moore made sense. But are Parker and Turturro playing significantly younger than they really are? Or is there some further twisted thing going on in this film's alternate reality? It seemed entirely plausible throughout the film that Aida Turturro's character was the actress's age but the character's mental problems included a distortion of her own age. But this is thrown off by the presence of Parker. Or at least it seems to be thrown off. Nothing in this film seems to be what it should, or could, or would. It just is.