Romance & Cigarettes is a blue-collar musical starring James Gandolfini as a Brooklyn construction worker in search of the eponymous romance, who has an adulterous affair with an English redhead (Kate Winslet) to the fury of his wife (Susan Sarandon), smokes too many of the eponymous cigarettes and dies of lung cancer.
It's directed by John Turturro, who apparently began writing it while playing the lead in the Coens' Barton Fink, and it employs the device that Dennis Potter used so brilliantly of having characters mime to popular songs that express or comment on the feelings they can't articulate.
It's heavy-handed, though briefly enlivened by Steve Buscemi as a sexist fellow worker giving bad advice to Gandolfini, and by Christopher Walken, a fine dancer, who appeared in the film version of Potter's Pennies From Heaven.
There's nothing in the picture as full of vibrant life as the wonderful opening moment of Kelly and Donen's On the Town when the hard-hat crane driver strolls to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard singing 'I feel like I'm not out of bed'.
Copyright 2006  guardian.co.uk
