Nonnas: Vince Vaughn's half-baked food comedy is no Big Night

Telegraph

08-05-2025

Nonnas wants to be heart-warming Italian food porn and buys in all the ingredients you'd think would work. Its surprise garnish? Grannies. To be precise, four old ladies, only two of whom actually have families. This quartet's bickering exploits in a restaurant kitchen are destined to lift Vince Vaughn 's grieving hero out of the dumps.
Such is the true story behind Enoteca Maria, now a Staten Island institution which has been serving buzzy soul food ever since a blue-collar worker named Joe Scaravella, who'd just lost his mother and grandma, cooked up the idea in 2007.
This unlikely success story might have lent itself either to a sweet documentary or flavourful indie treatment – in keeping with the kitchen's ethos, which is all about family recipes handed down the generations. The approach we want can't be far off the much-loved 1996 comedy Big Night, whose co-director, Campbell Scott, duly gets a cameo as a media bigwig.
Instead, this thing has wound up as resolutely unobjectionable, iffy-looking Netflix content. The streamer didn't commission Nonnas, but of course they bought it, probably recognising how perfectly it suits the brand for being vaguely on in the background at home.
If Big Night holds up for its detail, characterisation, and the loving care with which it was crafted, Nonnas – on all those scores – feels like penne all'Amatriciana partially reheated in a microwave.
The screenwriting never rises above joining dots with a marker pen. The jokes are broad and cringe. Every time someone mentions 'capuzelle' (the traditional sheep's head that's the speciality of Lorraine Bracco 's grumpy Sicilian matriarch), we're meant to chuckle, because it's so gross. Director Stephen Chbosky has shown a knack with schmaltzy formulae before (in The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Wonder), but this is closer to his lumpen, unappetising Dear Evan Hansen.
In other circumstances, Vaughn – practically copying the vehicle his old pal Jon Favreau gave himself in Chef (2014) – might have been touchingly understated in this role. It's hard, though, when he has nothing to do but mope, look crestfallen, and glide through a frictionless romantic subplot alongside Linda Cardellini.
The nonnas, you'd hope, should be riding to the rescue. There's an underwhelming food fight with tomatoes, and real talk when they get mildly sozzled in Susan Sarandon's hair salon. Pickings, that's to say, are as slim for them as us: we get Bracco (relentless grumbler); Sarandon (vivacious, man-eating baker with implants); Talia Shire (mousy nun, twist: lesbian), and 85-year-old Brenda Vaccaro, who steals the film in the simplest way possible, with an unmistakable air of having a good time.
If June Squibb were in any way Italian, they'd definitely have squeezed her in. In fact, they might as well have done. Nonnas is innocuous to a fault, murderously fond of tarantellas on the soundtrack, and doesn't come within hawk-and-spit distance of authentic charm.