Female gangsters can stand the heat
Elisabeth Moss, Tiffany Haddish and Melissa McCarthy are watching as a friendly hit man dismembers a dead body. He teaches them how to puncture the lungs so the body doesn’t float and instructs them on how to go about cutting off the arms and legs for easier transport.
Haddish and McCarthy turn away from the grim spectacle taking place in the bathtub, but Moss has the gleam of fascination in her eye. She
crouches down to be close to the action and asks, with quiet excitement, “Can I do the other leg?”
There’s a lot of good to be said for “The Kitchen,” about three Irish mafia wives who decide to take over the mob in Hell’s Kitchen. But the foundational good thing is this: It’s not funny. Writerdirector Andrea Berloff has taken a graphic novel and adapted it without making a liveaction cartoon. It’s a straight drama, with three great roles tailored to three vivid actresses.
The time is 1978, and it’s no fun to be a mob wife. Claire (Moss) is a punching bag for her outofcontrol husband, and Ruby (Haddish) is treated like a scorned servant by hers. Only Kathy (McCarthy) has anything approaching a decent marriage, but it hardly matters: All three husbands are sent up the river for long prison sentences, and the women are left to fend for themselves.
They can’t get jobs, because employers don’t want to hire women with children, and though the Irish mob is supposed to be taking care of them, the women aren’t getting enough money to pay the rent. The mob and the Irish in general are in decline in Manhattan, and store owners are refusing to pay protection money.
It is the stuff of comic books that these three wives should decide to start doing mob collections on their own. It’s beyond an unusual course of action. It’s almost crazy — in real life, they could never succeed. Yet Berloff ’s treatment of the story and her direction of the actors keep “The Kitchen” just within the constraints of believability, which is right where you want a movie to be: right on the edge, extreme enough to be interesting and never falling.
It’s only in the past few years that Moss, Haddish and McCarthy have become, individually, reason enough to see a movie. Just earlier this year, with “Her Smell,” Moss showed us what she can give us onscreen — deep hurt, deep anger, total fearlessness — and though “The Kitchen” gives us a different Moss, it’s Moss in the same vein. This is Bette Davis 3.0, updated for the 21st century. This is a powerhouse.
“The Kitchen” shows that Haddish can channel her power into a dramatic role, without once relying on her ability to be hilarious. There’s always been a hint of something a little wounded and angry about Haddish, and she’s smart enough here not to play the woundedness, but the anger. We can infer the rest.
As for McCarthy, she gets to travel the widest emotional distance over the course of “The Kitchen,” going from soft to hard, lost to found and frightened to fearless. “Can You Ever Forgive Me” was no oneoff. With the right script, McCarthy can do anything.
“The Kitchen” is not a great film. Its graphic novel origins can’t be completely obscured. But it’s a very good film, and a deeply satisfying one. It puts three actresses in a traditionally male genre — the gangster film — but doesn’t give us “Captain Marvel” with a sex change. It doesn’t distort women to accommodate the genre, but broadens the genre to accommodate women. So we get characters dealing with their husbands, dealing with male resentment, worrying about their children, even as they’re planning assassinations. This is a fresh, new way to make a gangster movie.
Speaking of female gangsters, no review of “The Kitchen” should overlook Margo Martindale, who steals every scene she’s in as a mob matriarch — a gravelly voiced monster with a gutter mouth and a big photo of John F. Kennedy on her wall. Martindale gets to be evil and has as much fun onscreen as she can without smiling.