Ethnic Cartoons

By J.C.

At a group therapy session on Christmas Eve, Pandora Gold from The Bronx announces, "I've been trying very hard to give up my symptoms. I'm a failure at everything." At the same session, after Pandora is duly comforted, Giggy Pinimba from Brooklyn says defensively, "I get depressed around the holidays like everybody else, but I'm no fag."

Made for Each Other is the fitfully funny chronicle of their perhaps inevitable love affair. The trouble is that every ethnic stereotype that they represent is milked for every obvious laugh.

Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna, the actors who play the two leading roles, are also the screenwriters. Their script has some good, nutty ideas (Giggy graduates from college at age 29, being perhaps the only Italian American who ever majored in what his father derisively calls "colored people's studies"), but it bogs down too often in desultory improvisation and strident soul-searching. They did better in their previous screenplay, Lovers and Other Strangers. That too featured your favorite minority emblems -- loudmouthed Italian fathers in undershirts, shrewish Jewish mamas nagging at the small fry and prodding their older progeny to marriage -- but rendered them affectionately, with the kind of insider's insight that made them something more than cartoons.

Here they are just cartoons. Taylor and Bologna act them competently, but that is hardly worth two hours of anybody's time. Most of the rest of the company (Olympia Dukakis, Helen Verbit, Ron Carey) overact shamelessly and uninterestingly, although Louis Zorich, as Pandora's gallivanting father, has a couple of hilariously sleazy moments. Robert B. Bean directed, apparently by remote control.

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