Given that the new Netflix movie Nonnas is centred around Italian food, specifically pasta and even sheep’s head (capuzzelle), you’d expect it to be pretty savoury. But this movie is founded on sweetness. It boasts Vince Vaughn as a star, but doesn’t lean heavily into comedy outside of a few instances of his charming brand of genial wordplay. No, it’s content to tell its true story with a heavy helping of uncynical heart, mostly to its benefit but occasionally to its mild detriment.

Vaughn plays Joe Scaravella, a New Yorker who has just lost his mother, the most important woman in his life given that he’s unattached. As he’s processing her passing, he thinks back to moments during his childhood when he’d creep into the kitchen to witness the cooking of his mother and her mother, the latter being his nonna, who had a particular inimitable pasta sauce recipe that regrettably went with her to her grave. Joe should know it’s not imitable as he’s been trying to recreate it for years now.

Joe has inherited some money from his mother, and in this brew of memories, he gets the idea to open an Italian restaurant with a unique hook: The chefs will be real Italian nonnas. Given the pressure cooker environment of any restaurant kitchen, and the difficulty of succeeding in the restaurant business in general, it seems like the height of incautiousness to rely on the stamina of women in their 70s to produce your dishes. Especially since the nature of their culinary creativity relies on improvisation, a little dash of this and a little dash of that, not something that can be consistently recreated to summon back repeat customers hoping for the same experience.

Getting customers to come back is not Joe’s biggest problem. Getting them in the door the first time is more of a hurdle. Joe has chosen an insular neighbourhood in Staten Island for his Enoteca Maria, even though he’s not from that borough, and a local farmer’s market icon (Michael Rispoli) has spread the word to boycott the place, which belonged for a half century to his own recently passed friend. Joe’s contractor best friend (Joe Manganiello) has gotten the place looking great, and Joe’s got a quartet of keen nonnas (Susan Sarandon, Talia Shire, Lorraine Bracco and Brenda Vaccaro), but without customers, a restaurant doesn’t stay in business very long.

Given the way I’ve front-loaded the sweetness aspect of Nonnas, you can probably guess that this restaurant doesn’t go out of business. But movies like Stephen Chbosky’s film are not about guessing what comes next. They’re more about the flavour, and Nonnas has quite a lot of it, even though none of it is particularly daring – not like cooking a sheep’s head to sell as a regular menu item.

The tone of Nonnas starts with Vaughn, who came up in this business as a sarcastic wiseguy whose essential persona involved insincerity and maybe even a dash of bullying. That Vaughn is nowhere to be found here. You might say that Nonnas didn’t need an actor as capable as Vaughn at its centre, but it certainly does reap the rewards of it. You keep expecting Vaughn to make a sideways glance at the camera, to give some indication of how cheap and sentimental he thinks this all is. He never does, and that elevates it above the merely cheap and sentimental.

The film also avoids most of the pitfalls of ethnic humour constructed as high comedy. While there are a fair share of bigger moments, particularly in the clashing of heads of the characters played by Bracco and Vaccaro, there’s never a moment when you want to roll your eyes at the movie trying too hard. There’s nothing cringey like that Door Dash ad where the trio of Italian grandmothers speak in broken English and shout “bellissima!” from the sides of their jars of sauce. (If you haven’t seen that ad, count yourself lucky.) In fact, they defy stereotypes a lot more often than they confirm to them, particularly the mousy Shire, and Sarandon looking more like she’s 48 than 78.

Do you wish there was a little more here? Sure. There’s the chance for Nonnas to drown in its own niceness. Not that every character is nice to every other character, not in a movie where two headstrong Italian septuagenarians yell at each other every five minutes, not in a movie where a Sopranos alum (Rispoli) is trying to whack a restaurant before it even gets started. But there’s an overall nice feel to this thing – the reason the term “feel good movie” was coined – that can be anathema to cinephilia. Linda Cardellini plays Vaughn’s love interest, and she’s as nice as they come – even if she did break Jason Segel’s heart enough for him to write Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But now we’re getting sidetracked.

So what. If you can’t occasionally get on board for a movie that just makes you feel good, well, maybe you’re not that interesting after all.

Ever canny with its timing, Netflix released Nonnas just in time for Mother’s Day. (Hey, grandmothers are mothers too.) It’s good enough that it’s worth watching even if you’ve already missed your chance to share it with your own nonna.

 

Nonnas is currently streaming on Netflix.