Fatso

A movie that's been back on FXM Retro for a little while now is Fatso. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM.

The movie opens with a montage of a couple of cousins, Sal and Dominic, in a large Italian-American family in New York. As the two cousins grow up together, we see that they both have a great affection for food; way to confirm that stereotype about the Italian mother constantly feeding her children. At any rate, the love affair continues up until Sal is 39, when he rather abruptly dies of a heart attack, devastating Sal's extended family. Not that it stops adult Dominic (Dom DeLuise) from his epicurean desires during the wake.

This being a close-knit Italian family, Dominic and his kid brother Frankie (Ron Carey) live upstairs from their sister Antoinette (Anne Bancroft) and her family. Indeed, Antoinette and Dominic run a greeting-card store together, so they spend a lot of time together. And Antoinette having been close to Sal as well and seeing what happened to him, she starts worrying about her brother. Is Dominic going to die an early death too from obesity? She urges him to see a diet doctor, but understandably, Dominic doesn't want to.

Eventually he does, and he's frankly horrified at all the diet advice he's given, which contradicts every instinct related to food that he's had growing up. Two things make Dominic reach a breaking point. One is that he eats a piece of his nephew's birthday cake -- before he gets home with it. But more important is something that happens at work.

Just down the street, an antiques-themed gift shop opens, run by Lydia (Candice Azzara). Dominic sees her, and it's love at first sight. That might just give him the impetus to start eating better and lose weight. So he joins a group called the Chubby Checkers since apparently the filmmakers couldn't use the names of any of the 12-step groups. But it's still a huge struggle for Dominic to try to lose that weight, as all he can think about is food....

Fatso is a movie with an interesting premise, even if the ideas and execution seem a bit conventional. DeLuise is entertaining as the basically decent man who just has a problem with food. The old adage from The Narrow Margin that nobody likes a fat man except his grocer and his tailor isn't quite true. But the movie also has some problems, thanks to Anne Bancroft surprisingly enough. She wrote and directed in addition to starring, and it's there that the problems show up. Her character as written is to obnoxiously shrill. It's easy to understand that she loves her brother and doesn't want to see him die young the way their cousin did, but still you want to reach out and smack her to shut her up at times. And some of the scenes (not involving her character) come across as a little to zany and again loud.

Still, Fatso is an entertaining look at a New York of its era. Diet advice has advanced a bit since then, thankfully. And the 70s and 80s New York is always interesting to see. The movie is out of print on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the FXM showing if you want to see it.