Affecting enough but could have been better: B-

Directing is hard. Just ask Anne Bancroft, whose one directorial effort, “Fatso”, is all over the map in trying to be a broad comedy but also a tragic tale of food addiction. It really shouldn’t work at all but I think what people don’t give the film credit for is that it does feel personal- Bancroft’s script struggles for laughs but it has insight and it has a rare dramatic star turn from Dom Deluise, in a role he was seemingly born to play.

He plays Dom, a fat guy from a very close-knit Italian family. Even from a young age, Dom was enabled by a mother who fed him to shut him up, fed him when he was sick, and just kept feeding him. Now as an adult the man can’t stop. His fat cousin has died young and his sister Antoinette (Anne Bancroft) is so worried about him that she’s made him an appointment at the diet clinic.

The opening scene is pretty much a mess of the over the top- the Italian family is presented as crying buffoons throwing themselves over the coffin of the dead cousin. When it’s time to bury him, the coffin is so jumbo sized that it won’t even fit into the hole. Then there’s Dom, who keeps sneaking away to shovel bread into his mouth. It’s not funny because there’s no discipline to it. It’s too desperate for a laugh.


The movie does better as Dom begins his journey. His “I was gonna diet but got a pizza instead” I think is a more relatable joke. As is why most diets don’t work (they tell you to eliminate everything). Bancroft sees where the temptations- whether they be stress, advertising, ect- are coming from and most interestingly, makes the connection between food and family- that a lot of what we’re introduced to and what we’re enabled toward can come from that.

Another scene that made me laugh was Dom getting ravenously hungry at some point, so much so he attacks his brother to give him the key to the padlocked cupboards. It gets so intense that they both need to call in a version of a sober companion, “The Chubby Checkers”. Two checkers race out to help but soon all three are talking about food and we get a sense of not only how bad it is for these guys, but also that they instinctively (and somewhat creatively) have come up with ways to even make already fattening foods more fattening. The talk gets all three so ravenous that Bancroft even gives us a version of the “hulk-out” scene next.

That loss of control becomes affecting here and it’s played with wonderful vulnerability and sensitivity by Deluise. Dom’s powerlessness and shame can be read all over his face- most heartbreaking of all is the disappointment he’s causing to his own family. Those struggles in keeping his hunger and emotions in check is the movie’s highlight.

Bancroft continues to try a bit too hard for laughs here, both as director as well as in a grating performance as Dom’s overbearing sister- and after some nice insight she seems clueless as to how to end Dom’s story. Is love enough to overcome addiction? I liked a few scenes between Dom and his lady love, an antique store owner played by Candice Azzara. The way they bond over dead relatives is somewhat funny. But Dom’s story feels cut-off here. He’s mostly swapping one addiction for another and we feel short-shrifted on his personal growth. And while her film is not a complete strike-out, Bancroft could have used some as a writer-director, too.