Mystic Pizza

It's hard to believe that the movie Mystic Pizza is over 35 years old now, and at the point where it's getting inclusion in TCM lineups. It aired a month or so ago, so I recorded it, and now it's got another airing coming up tonight at 10:15 PM.

Jojo (Lili Taylor) Barboza is part of the Portuguese-American community that makes up a significant minority of working class towns from eastern Connecticut through Rhode Island and to the part of Massachusetts due south of Boston. She lives in Mystic, a town known for its maritime history museum Mystic Seaport, and is about to walk down the aisle to get married to lobsterman Bill Montijo (Vincent D'Onofrio). She gets to the altar and is about to do the whole vows thing, and... she faints. Flash back to how she got here....

Some months back, Jojo is a young woman working at Mystic Pizza, a pizza joint run by Leona (Conchata Ferrell) and her husband, the sort of downmarket place known for cheap formica tables and the like. She's a waitress there with her two best friends, sisters Daisy (Julia Roberts) and Kat (Annabeth Gish, no relation to Lillian) Araújo. Daisy isn't certain what she wants to do with her life, while Kat is the bright one with promise. She wants to become an astronomer and has even been accepted to Yale, but the money for tuition is an issue.

Kat also leads lectures at the Seaport planetarium and takes on a third job to make more money, that of playing babysitter to the young daughter of Tim Travers (William Moses), an architect who graduated from Yale himself. Tim's wife is currently working in England for several months while he restores one of the old houses in Mystic for them to use as a second home, hence the need for somebody to look after the child from time to time. Now, it's fairly obvious from the first scene, but Kat is going to develop a strong bond not just with the kid, but with Tim too, which is a problem since he's married.

Jojo, as we've already mentioned, is in a relationship with Bill. She seems to be in it for no small part for the sex, and in a role reversal from the Hollywood stereotypes for relationship desires, it's Bill who wants the long-term commitment which is why he keeps trying to convince Jojo to get engaged and then marry him. Her being unsure of this threatens to destroy the relationship and is part of why she faints at altar.

As for Daisy, one night when the three young women go out to a bar in town, a bunch of townies presumably from Yale (which is really on the other side of the state from Mystic) show up because one of them, Charles Windsor Jr. (Adam Storke), is from a wealthy family that has a vacation home in the area. He thinks he's hot stuff and challenges the yokel locals first at darts and then pool, where Daisy easily bests him. The two start a relationship themselves, but of course it's another relationship where you know it's also going to hit a bump in the road because of the stark class differences between the two.

Who will find love in the end and who won't? Well, to get the answer to that question you'll have to watch the movie.

Mystic Pizza is a well-made movie, aided in no small part by location shooting mostly in towns near Mystic. All three of the female leads are good, as is D'Onofrio. Obviously, with the focus on the women, younger women are going to enjoy this one more than younger men. And if you don't pay too close attention, you probably won't mind the fact that the story is fairly formulaic.