Year: 1992
Director: John Turturro
Writer: John Turturro and Brandon Cole
Cinematographer: Ron Fortunato
Cast: John Turturro, Ellen Barkin, Michael Badalucco
Running Time: 117 min.
John Turturro is best known as a character actor in films ranging from the
Coen brothers’ Big Lebowski to Michael Bay’s recent blockbuster
Transformers, but over the past fifteen years he has also crafted a
reputation as a director of artistically ambitious, independent American
cinema. With Turturro as director, co-writer and star, Mac marked an
auspicious filmmaking debut, displaying the actor’s talent on both sides of
the camera. For this film, Turturro drew on memories of his own father, a contractor in
Queens during the post-World War Two housing boom. Mac tells the story of
Niccolo “Mac” Vitelli, an Italian American carpenter whose high standards
and personal integrity lead him to start his own construction business. His
uncompromising devotion to work alienates him from his two brothers, wife
and son, but over time they come to view the fruits of his labor with pride.
The film’s portrait of 1950s working-class New York is realistic yet
lyrical, and Turturro’s vibrant performance makes the tough, driven “Mac”
Vitelli impossible to forget. Roger Ebert writes, “Mac can be a hard man to live with, but he represents something real in the modern American character, and at the end of the film we feel that Mac’s qualities are needed in an age when people would rather
make money out of money than houses out of lumber.”
