TV REVIEWS : ‘Mafia Marriage’: Absorbing Portrait

Mafiosi-watchers are treated to a mob wife’s view of the infamous Bonanno crime family in the comparatively nonviolent but absorbing “Love, Honor & Obey: The Last Mafia Marriage” (Sunday and Tuesday at 9 p.m. on CBS, Channels 2 and 8).

Based on the autobiographical book “Mafia Marriage” by Rosalie Bonanno (daughter-in-law of crime boss Joseph Bonanno), the production’s period detail and sweeping look at the rise and fall of the Bonanno clan adds yet another piece to the Mafia puzzle.

It overlaps a slew of other Mafia movies, particularly CBS’ “Honor Thy Father” of 1973, which was based on the Gay Talese chronicle about the same Bonanno family. In fresh contrast, “The Last Mafia Marriage” is a mob story seen through the eyes of a woman who is both an insider and an outsider.

At its core, the script by Christopher Canaan basically skirts the “Godfather”-inspired movie we’ve come to anticipate and levels instead a personal, domestic focus on the tumultuous marriage of gangland heir Salvatore (Bill) Bonanno (Eric Roberts) and his picturebook-homemaker wife Rosalie (Nancy McKeon).

With director John Patterson catching the swagger of the Bonannos in their heyday, the 1956 wedding of Bill Bonanno and Rosalie Profaci assumes the royal status of a mob prince and his princess--in what would be the last arranged Mafia nuptial flapping together two powerful mob families.

Subtly, the movie also mirrors how the embattled course of this marriage paralleled the ebb tide of the Mafia dynasty itself.

Sunday’s episode centers on Rosalie Bonanno’s gradual loss of innocence. Her naivete is almost impossible to believe, but McKeon nicely registers the shock of “a little Sicilian wife” who discovers too late that all the men in her family are outlaws. That starts with grinning papa Joseph Bonanno (Ben Gazzara in a solid portrait of an aging crime ruler steeped in Sicilian code and tradition).

Tuesday’s concluding segment finally gets its feet bloody with the obligatory cliche of mob slaughter in an Italian restaurant, complete with a fusillade of bullets cutting down guys wearing napkins over plates of spaghetti. How many times have we seen that?

But with this token quotient of violence out of the way, the movie veers to the contemporary heart of its liberation theme--the growing independence of the enslaved Rosalie. When her husband, in a chiseled performance by Roberts, has to go to prison, Rosalie is left penniless, forced to get a job and raise their three kids on her own. She grows up fast.