Solo Mio — a Rom-Com for Men

In the turn-of-the-century TV sitcom King of Queens (1998–2007), rotund actor Kevin James played delivery man Doug Heffernan, reviving Jackie Gleason’s working-class bus-driver husband Ralph Kramden archetype from the classic ’50s TV series The Honeymooners. Now James updates that character in Solo Mio, a feature film rom-com that goes beyond Ralph Kramden’s macho bravado and peels back the protective covering of contemporary masculine panic.

James plays Matt Taylor, a bald, scruffy-bearded American public school art teacher (and shy artist) whose fiancée leaves him stranded at the altar in Rome where they had planned their destination wedding. Now a lonely, stressed-out, and insecure tourist, Matt is rescued from a gang of teen pickpockets by feisty Roman café owner Gia (Nicole Grimaudo), his star-crossed love match. But Solo Mio is less about romantic fate than it is about the self-doubt that Matt must overcome to fulfill his masculine potential.

Solo Mio takes on a subject that’s scary for this era when “toxic masculinity” has undermined white male confidence vis-à-vis the awkwardness of American feminism. Yes, the film’s answer to this crisis is simplistic: Matt needs salvation, and Gia is a woman who leads and forgives and understands all. She’s especially sensitive following her own past romantic and social struggles. Plus, she’s rich. Their pairing confronts and resolves the dishonest class issues of such gimmicky sitcoms as When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail.

It is the American-to-European cultural transition that gives Solo Mio rickety charm. It’s a product of Angel Studios, the independent production and distribution company dedicated to “values based” entertainment with Christian themes. (It’s best known for the social and historical films Sound of Freedom and Bonhoeffer.)

In Solo Mio, Angel Studios risks the minefields of sexual attraction and spiritual fidelity that Hollywood has toyed with since the great days of Depression- and World War II–era screwball comedies but has lately squandered amid the current gender wars.

That’s why Solo Mio confuses its romantic archetypes, replacing American sitcoms King of Queens and The Honeymooners with exotic musical standards: The title Solo Mio is a vulgarized malaprop of the romantic Italian ballad “O Sole Mio” (turning “My Sunshine” to “Lonely Me”). Gia’s cousin turns out to be the celebrated tenor Andrea Bocelli (surprisingly tall next to Kevin James), who inspires Matt’s rendition of the Puccini aria “Nessun dorma” (Bocelli does a slapstick parody of Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, but on horseback).

It is Angel Studios’ conceit to use music to familiarize what might be alienating, unfamiliar, or disturbing about modern sexual mores. (The ’50s post-WWII hit Three Coins in a Fountain capitalized on exactly such exoticizing, as did David Lean’s Summertime, from 1955. This pure-hearted film responds to TV’s dirty-minded The White Lotus.) Thus, pop tunes by Ed Sheeran are included to express Matt’s timid longing.

A mediocre song like Sheeran’s “Photograph” reveals that the central impulse behind Solo Mio is the American male’s confrontation with American feminist neurosis. Matt’s fiancée Heather (Julie Ann Emery) is herself a mess of selfishness and insecurity. Matt encounters two American honeymooning couples (Kim Coates and Alyson Hannigan, Jonathan Roumie and Julee Cerda) who lend eccentric, psychotherapeutic advice to Matt. “Who are you guys?,” Matt cries. When he eventually bonds with these hen-pecked men who are lost in pursuit of their own agency, one recalls the comic ingenuity of the Adam Sandler productions I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and The Wrong Missy.

Solo Mio was directed by Angel Studios pros Chuck and Dan Kinnane and written by James, Patrick, and John Kinnane — a masculine family project to produce a family-values film. Their best lines inform Matt: “You were honest. It’s okay to not be okay if you’re not okay.” The Kinnanes recognize contemporary sexual conflict although never avowing the spirituality achieved by Leo McCarey, Ernst Lubitsch, and Preston Sturges — or James Sweeney in his modern screwball classics Straight Up and Twinless. But the final sitcom twist of Matt and Gia both confessing a letter-writing twist hails to those classics. It suggests there might be a future for a masculine sitcom.