Mystic Pizza (1988)

Film: Mystic Pizza (1988)

Stars: Annabeth Gish, Julia Roberts, Lili Taylor, Vincent D'Onofrio, Willam R. Moses, Adam Storke, Conchata Ferrell, Matt Damon

Director: Donald Petrie

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 (and now 2025) Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Julia Roberts: click here to learn more about Ms. Roberts (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Julia Roberts early career is such an uphill climb that it might honestly be a straight line north.  When she came to Hollywood she was just Eric Roberts' kid sister; by the time of her screen debut in 1987's Satisfaction, her big brother Eric (now a bit of a trivia punchline for the amount of random movie appearances he's made in literally hundreds of low-budget & independent films) had spent a decade making appearances in prestige fare like Raggedy Man, The Pope of Greenwich Village, & Runaway Train (which won him his sole Oscar nomination to date).  But by 1988, kid sister Julia was attracting attention, first in her breakout role in today's movie Mystic Pizza (a sleeper hit), then getting her own matching Oscar nomination in Steel Magnolias, and a second as the lead of Pretty Woman.  Steel Magnolias was a big hit, but Pretty Woman was a movie that Hollywood couldn't really ignore-making over $400 million, at the time of its release it was the fifth-highest grossing film of ALL TIME, having grosses that put it next to Star Wars & Jaws.  Though it would lose that top five spot later in the year to Ghost (starring Demi Moore, who would spend much of the next decade alongside Julia Roberts as one of the biggest and most-discussed actresses of the era), the signs were clear-Julia Roberts had not just arrived as America's next sweetheart, she was also a movie star who could compete with figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Harrison Ford in terms of box office performance...and as Hollywood would soon find out, she'd demand to get paid like she was worth that much.

(Spoilers Ahead) Mystic Pizza is about three young women who work in a pizza parlor in a small town in Connecticut named Mystic (a real town, in fact).  We have sisters Kat (Gish), the brainy one, and Daisy (Roberts), the sexy rebellious one, joined by JoJo (Taylor), their horny friend who just left her husband-to-be Bill (D'Onofrio) at the alter.  After JoJo breaks off her engagement (but not her relationship) with Bill in the film's opening scenes, we spend a summer with these three young women, all dealing with their various romantic relationships.  JoJo is trying to find a balance between her independence and giving her life over to a man, while Kat is shedding her goody-two-shoes layers before attending Yale by becoming smitten with (and eventually sleeping with) the adult man (Moses) whose daughter she is nannying for.  We also get an interlude with Daisy falling for a guy from the right-side-of-the-tracks named Charlie (Storke) who has dropped out of law school & is struggling with his uptight New England family (in his film debut, Matt Damon plays his little brother in a scene late in the picture...you gotta wonder if Roberts & Damon spent any of their time on the Ocean's pictures discussing that this was not their first film together).

The movie Mystic Pizza is more of an ensemble piece than Pretty Woman, and doesn't necessarily "star" Julia Roberts (she doesn't even get top billing), though you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise looking at it now.  Roberts is magnetic here, wonderfully stealing every scene she's in, even against formidable talent like Taylor & Gish.  There's a scene early in the picture where she's playing pool, and she's so unfathomably sexy with her mane of iconic hair and that sly, Lloyd's-of-London-worthy smile coming out that the entire movie sort of falls silent as you can hear everyone's blood pressure start to rise.  The movie gains from this, as it's not a particularly funny or groundbreaking picture, but having so many likable & impressive young actors early in their careers makes it feel fresh.

I will note, that while I was prepared for Roberts to be intoxicating here (this film is part of her legend for a reason), what I was not expecting was how unfathomably sexy Vincent D'Onofrio is in this movie.  I would not normally name-check D'Onofrio as a sex symbol (he's so known for playing characters that really mess with his physical appearance he's hard to pin down in that way), but you will be stunned how upsettingly good-looking he is in this movie.  He plays a fisherman who basically makes Lili Taylor feral (to the point where in one scene she understandably begs him to let her give him oral sex), and girl...I get it.

Next week, we're going to talk about what fame did to Julia Roberts in the early 1990's, and one of the biggest hits of her newfound movie stardom, which would team her alongside another quintessential movie star of the era.