It's Weird that Toni Collette's 'Mafia Mamma' Got Made in 2023

By Jason Adams | Film | April 14, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Film | April 14, 2023 |

Speaking as one of the world’s longest-running Toni Collette fans—and don’t you dare doubt my bonafides; I’ve been religiously quoting Muriel’s Wedding since ‘95—I say this in appreciation. But what a very strange movie star Toni Collette makes for. I suppose that’s often the feeling when one rises in Hollywood by sheer force of talent and through years of constant work, over just being a blandly pretty young thing discovered at the cream-soda counter. There is nothing bland about Toni Collette. She couldn’t be bland if you tied her hands behind her back and put her behind frosted glass.

So even in a bland thing like Mafia Mamma, Twilight and Thirteen director Catherine Hardwicke’s rom-com crossed with The Godfather that’s out this weekend, Toni still somehow comes out sparkling like a diamond. This sees her play a stressed-out empty-nester named Kristin who stumbles upon her husband cheating on her basically the same day her son heads off to college. And as if all of that wasn’t enough she almost simultaneously gets a phone call from Italy telling her of the death of her grandfather who she never knew and who, uhh, seems to’ve been a Mafia Pappa. And before you know it Toni is walking in slow-motion away from explosions, she’s got sliced-off fingers caught in her hair, and Monica Bellucci—Monica Bellucci!!!—is straddling her on an outdoor mattress. That’s-a spicy meat-a-ball.

But brushing aside the depressing roles that’ve swallowed Collette up as of late—no autopsies for her this time, no sir!—this movie blessedly lets her let her hair down (sliced-off fingers sometimes included) and just be an enormous goofball. That’s something those of us who’ve been fans since Muriel’s Wedding have known her more than capable of, but also something she ventures into far too infrequently. I don’t think I’ve seen her play anything this broad since The United States of Tara? And this doesn’t have any of that Dissociative Disorder baggage to drag it down. Just spandex dresses, dessert plates, and decapitations, oh my. (The extreme violence in this movie is deeply unexpected and, Toni aside, my favorite thing about it.)

Not to put this movie even close to the level of my babygirl Muriel, though. As the legendary mean-girl Tania Degano says in that 1994 film, “You’ve got to find someone on your level.” And Mafia Mamma’s level is down down down amid the sort of dusty high-concept deeply-forgettable dreck that you’d see a movie-star coast through on the strength of their charm alone often in the mid-90s. Picture Melanie Giffith in Milk Money or Julia Roberts in I Love Trouble. If you can picture those movies at all, that is—I can’t imagine anyone’s given them much thought since their real-estate-agents got their percentage off the vacation homes Melanie & Julia bought with their paychecks.

But that’s what has me contemplating the movie stardom of Toni Collette today here thanks to Mafia Mamma. Because for one, movie-star vehicles of that sort just don’t get made anymore. You really have to go back 20-plus years to their heyday. And Collette in particular has never before been that kind of movie star anyway. It’s plain weird that this movie got made in 2023. So even if the jokes are as stale as a bowl of pasta left out in the sun for a month I still can’t be that angry at it. Do I wish they’d given the script a dozen more passes before they plopped this one down and said, “Ehh good enough”? Sure. But maybe Toni had an opening on her calendar mid-pandemic and just said fuck it, Mamma’s going to Italy.

And so if Mafia Mamma does reek of a vanity project, one where Toni just wanted to travel, eat good food, romance some seriously hot Italian men (and this movie’s got a pair of doozies in Giulio Corso as her meet-cute Lorenzo and Giuseppe Zeno as her mafioso enemy Carlo) and then get straddled by Monica Bellucci (Monica Bellucci!!! I still can’t get over she’s in this thing), then so be it. Hasn’t Toni earned her “Eat Pray Fuck!” as her character chants repeatedly mantra-like here? They can’t all be Muriels.