Little Italy (2018)
Review of Little Italy (2018), directed by Donald Petrie
The first time I watched this movie, it was available for free on Amazon Prime. It isn’t available on there now, but when I saw it added to Netflix in October of 2021, I felt a strange pang of nostalgia. I don’t know why because I’m not Canadian nor am I Italian-American, but I think when I watched this I was a tad less cynical about the world.
Anyways, rewatching this movie sparked a new curiosity in me about the Italian diaspora and how food has evolved with the changing circumstances of Italians in new environments.
I ended up picking some books about the history of Italian-Americans, especially in New York City, to try and figure out some of this research on my own before graduate school.
Little Italy is the perfect lighthearted movie for a rainy Tuesday night when you’re feeling sad. It’s got romance, comedy, and some awful pranks between two feuding families. And, above all else, it’ll make you hungry enough to want and order a pizza to eat as you sit in bed and watch the movie. And that, my friends, it the perfect lazy Tuesday night.
Let’s begin the review!
In Toronto’s Little Italy, two families begin a war over pizza.
We begin with a simple story: two Italian-Canadian families in Little Italy own a pizza restaurant together. One family is really good at making pizza sauce, while the other makes pizza dough the best way possible. Together, their pizza is like crack for the locals. But then something happens, causing a massive rift between the two families, and they stubbornly open two competing pizza joints right next to each other and succumb to a life of trying to ruin the other’s business.
Insert: romance. The young daughter of the one family, Nikki, and the son of the other family, Leo, were tight as thieves when the two families were combined. And then the rifts happens and Nikki moves to London to go to culinary school.
The plot of this movie starts when Nikki comes home for two weeks, finds Leo at a bar, and gets so blackout drunk that she sleeps with him and wakes up in his bed. This then causes these massive tense questions of what the heck are they and why they keep acting awkward around each other (which, to be honest, I blame the lack of chemistry between the two actors for this problem).
What I find hilarious is that Eater named this the worst food movie to come out that year. And, to be honest, they’re not wrong about that at all. For a movie about Italian diaspora culture and two families owning restaurants, the only shot of food we see the most is a vat of tomato sauce.
And even then, this tantalizing glimpse is only brief, a few seconds of sauce glistening under the hot, sweaty lights. The only actual nice shot we see of a pizza is at the very end when there’s a food competition between Nikki and Leo and she lets him win. Those pizzas shown there were quite the cuties.
I think for a movie about a very distinct immigrant culture, this just felt super inauthentic. First of all we have the Asian guy pretending to be a part of the Italian community with a name Luigi—I really wanted to know more about this kid. Like how did he and Leo meet?
I found him to be the most entertaining character in this movie and I will, quite frankly, say that he was the only somewhat redeeming performance in this burning pizza show. And when I say inauthentic, I found that it relied way too much on overused stereotypes rather than reclaiming them as within their own spaces and experiences. Certain things just felt like a checklist of what’s supposed ot be considered Italian on film.
I also found the grandmother and grandfather to be the only ones falling within a distinctly more unique cultural stereotype of immigrant Italian, which is kind of what I’d expected, but then it got weird. Like the grandmother and grandfather (each is from an opposing family) get married.
And then Leo and Nikki are supposed to get together? Aren’t they now like…cousins or something? This is a very strange case of accidental incest and I just don’t care enough about these characters to go along with it. I was also very confused at how the grandmother and grandfather got together originally because we have zero backstory. Like why are they just sleeping together now?
Overall Thoughts
Just don’t bother unless you’re extremely bored. I found it entertaining because I was bored on a Tuesday night while trapped indoors, so it’s not like I had much better options of things to do. You’ll probably get hungry just because of the sheer amount of times they mention pizza, but this isn’t like Moonstruck.
You’ll find better movies and books about Italian diaspora culture elsewhere. Also, I wanted to know more about Nikki’s time in culinary school. For someone who’s working under a prestigious chef, she sure does a lot of nothing. Hell, she doesn’t even do the homework she was supposed to do even. Sighs, how frustrating. Don’t subject yourself to this.
