Bancroft: Fatso (1980)

Fatso is not only the first and only film written and directed by Anne Bancroft, but one of the most powerful films to come to terms with that quintessentially American condition – overeating. Or, for Bancroft, that Italian-American condition, since this is first and foremost a wonderfully delirious vision of Italian-American culture as one giant oral fixation, and every Italian-American institution, from communion to cannoli, as one great ample-breasted mother, doling out culinary consolement at every turn, especially in an immigrant culture severed from the mother country and forced to define its territory, legitimacy and identity through food as never before. Personifying but by no means exhausting that backdrop is Dominic DiNapoli (Dom DeLuise), a second-generation Italian immigrant living in New York’s Little Italy, as well as a chronic overeater who vows to diet when his younger cousin dies of a heart attack, but is unable to really discipline himself until he falls in love with Lydia Bollowenski (Candice Azzarra), a local antiques dealer, and even then struggles to choose between his mouth and his heart, to the chagrin of his volatile sister Antoinette, played by Bancroft herself. In a very real sense, the film is this one man’s efforts to diet – and how it contours his relationship with family and friends – which would probably becoming boring or exploitative were it not for the exquisite way in which Bancroft eludes and embraces comedy and tragedy at the same time, precluding and confounding any sadistic voyeurism on the part of the audience as well as tapping into the tragicomic register that DeLuise did best. Sometimes he’s eating to stop crying, sometimes he’s eating to continue laughing – in both cases, chowing down on something delicious while sobbing, stressing or soliloquising in some quintessentially DeLuisean fashion, performing or expunging some trauma - but neither tragedy or comedy really sticks, as Bancroft instead embraces overeating as a peculiar if sometimes painful sensitivity to urban space, crafting one culinary tableaux after another with a beautiful taste for all the nooks, crannies and interstices where the binge eater can find, imagine or project food, from greeting stands to the Metropolitan Museum Art gift shop, in a kind of cognitive mapping of Italian-American New York as it stood in the early 1980s. Not only is there food in every scene, but it quickly feels indistinguishable from the spicy, piquant, histrionic Italianisms of Bancroft’s script, whose crazy conversational mouthfeels might start to feel somewhat stagy were they not set against this beautiful culinary flanerie – Baudelaire’s “gastronomy of the eye” taken to its logical and literal conclusion – whose wanderings don’t merely take us from one food counter and late-night television commercial to the next, but collapse us into a roving, hungry eye, a dispersed ambient appetite that’s not so different from that of the script itself, especially as Dominic is distended and expanded through a whole host of digestive surrogates, augmented and post-human gastrointestinal tracts that twirl around him as absurdly and improbably as his trademark tuba. And the great twist of the film is that Dominic’s romance doesn’t redeem him from food but redeems him through food, as binge-eating gives way to binge-kissing and he cements his eventual engagement to Lydia with a wedding ring made out of apatite. In some ways, that’s a bold conclusion – once an overeater, always an overeater, even when dieting – to a film that’s equally bold, not merely in its simple gesture of showing people eating as often and as indiscriminately as they do in real life, but in the kind of story it tells about the Italian-American community, a story that perhaps only Bancroft – born, after all, to first-generation immigrant parents as  Anna Maria Louisa Italiano – could overegg to this extent without caricaturing her subject matter or removing one shred of his dignity.