Reviewed by Peter Debruge

John Turturro’s Romance & Cigarettes is a labor of love (and that doesn’t even count the Sisyphean two-year challenge the director faced in actually getting the movie in front of audiences). That’s because the movie tackles love in all its banal forms — a married man (James Gandolfini) stepping out with a younger lady (Kate Winslet), the man’s devoted wife (Susan Sarandon) willing to humor any fault of his but this and the teenage daughter (Mandy Moore) head-over-heels for a neighborhood tomcat (Bobby Cannavale) — each one presented with such fresh intelligence you’d never guess the subject had already surfaced in a million other movies.

On-screen love (or what passes for it) is seldom more than shorthand, when the real deal happens after the credits roll, when couples discover one another’s limitations and learn to tough it out. “Passion” better defines the swoony sensation behind those old-Hollywood clutches or soft-focus fireside tumbles. We seldom catch characters in the midst of love — that is, 20 years in, still putting their partners first, in sickness and in health and so on. That’s all well and good when the average moviegoer is 13 years old and hasn’t experienced anything of the sort, but what about us grown-ups?

Turturro, whose career includes some of the most eccentric (Barton Fink) and human (Illuminata) characters imaginable, has taken a lifetime of actorly insights about the way people work and assembled them into a film that is unlike anything I’ve ever seen — and yet, more like life than nearly any movie I can think of. Romance & Cigarettes is as odd and original a film as you’re likely to see all year. See it with an audience, if you can, since the approach is different enough that you may need the reassurance of a crowd to embrace the film’s wild swings from raunchy sentiment to surreal candor.

As critics, we seldom get a chance to let films percolate, frequently rushing home immediately after seeing a movie to offer our knee-jerk judgment. Because of the trials and tribulations Romance & Cigarettes faced between its 2005 festival run and its 2007 theatrical release (which I won’t get into here), I had the unique pleasure of letting the film sink in over the course of two years, and for all its eccentricities (of which there are many), I discovered that I simply couldn’t let this film go. In fact, over time, the movie’s crazier qualities (such as casting middle-age actresses Mary-Louise Parker, Aida Turturro and Amy Sedaris as teenagers) only endeared me to it all the more.

The story centers around a group of blue-collar characters living in Queens, New York, experiencing emotions that any of us can relate to, but cursed as many of us are without the spontaneous movie-star eloquence to express themselves. When language betrays them, they fall back on song — again, not the perfectly chosen lyrics of Sondheim or Hammerstein, but the pop stylings of middlebrow heroes like Engelbert Humperdinck and Dusty Springfield.

Yes, Romance & Cigarettes is a musical, but it’s only half-heartedly so. I can’t phrase it any better than Roger Ebert did when he first saw the movie at the Toronto Film Festival two years ago: “The musical numbers are gloriously messy with exuberance: Just like in real life, the characters have a jukebox in their heads playing their favorite songs, which sometimes burst out onto the sound track and cause whole neighborhoods to sing along, even the cops and garbage men.”

That glorious messiness has caused others to complain that Turturro doesn’t know how to shoot or choreograph a musical number, but I don’t expect that from him. He’s not making Hairspray here (and critics seem to have forgiven Adam Shankman that same failing, even though he was making Hairspray). At risk of being dismissed forever out of sheer silliness by increasingly cynical audiences, musicals are going through a fascinating phase. In the last decade, we’ve seen a dozen different attempts to reinvent the format, each one trying a different tactic: Moulin Rouge went for pastiche, Chicago imagined the numbers inside a character’s head, Dreamgirls put them on stages and Once tried to go gritty, setting songs against the backdrop of kitchen-sink realism.

Of the recent attempts, Romance & Cigarettes is most like Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, another jukebox musical that put existing songs in the mouths of everyday characters. Both films embrace the fact that musicals make contemporary audiences nervous, playing some songs for sentiment and others for laughs, while having honest fun with the fantasy of it all. You have not lived until you’ve seen Christopher Walken side-stepping down the street to Tom Jones’ “Delilah,” yet such wink-wink moments in Romance & Cigarettes serve another purpose, too, buying Turturro permission to be sincere about the movie’s non-musical emotional scenes.

Of all the pleasures film can give us, none is greater than the opportunity to inhabit the consciousness of someone else, and Turturro is observant enough about human nature to get us inside the head of Gandolfini’s character, Nick Murder. In the opening scenes, we see how Tula (Kate Winslet as a sexy lingerie saleswoman with a vulgar vocabulary and a thick Mancunian accent) invades his every thought, her memory still smoldering in the lipstick-smeared cigarette butts that fill the ashtray of his beat-up old car. Nick needs her validation, but misses the message that his wife loves him, too, even if her willingness to wax his back and trim his nose hairs can’t compare to Tula’s flaming passion.

With his left-field sense of humor, Turturro blindsides us with jokes that would never fit in a conventional Hollywood comedy, drawing attention to details from our lives that that trigger instant recognition. Like an expert novelist, he finds a way to express the poetry in the seemingly mundane so that the entire film practically bursts with affection for its characters, the world, life. Sure, Turturro is capable of silliness, but there’s a maturity to his sensibility, so that when Nick tells Tula, “Look, I almost love you,” we understand that — finally — he’s realized that what he feels for his wife is somehow deeper, that passion is selfish, but love is something else entirely. Something worth singing about.

Romance & Cigarettes is as odd and original a film as you're likely to see all year (don't believe me? check out these great clips)