Gandolfini and Sarandon in a most eccentric musical

Love and cigarettes are both hazardous to your health, but what's really lethal is singing about them, as we discover in one of the most eccentric musical dramedies of this or any millennium.

Bursting into song is one thing. Breaking and entering it is another. That's what James Gandolfini and Susan Sarandon are called upon to do in "Romance & Cigs." It's a tale of working-class Murder -- not the crime, the surname. Nick Murder (Gandolfini), an ironworker in Queens, isn't a bad guy, but he makes the mistake of cheating on his high-strung wife Kitty (Sarandon). How could he resist the sizzling allure of potty-mouthed Tula (Kate Winslet)? How could Tula fail to resist Nick's puffy mug, paunch and poetry?

More to the issue, in writer-director John Turturro's seriocomic script, how could Nick do such a thing to Kitty?

Sharp-tongued Mrs. Murder is not the type to suffer in silence. She and her vicariously outraged daughters-in-pain will have a lot to say -- and sing -- about it in the course of Nick's banishment, punishment and possible redemption.

Much of the saying (and all of the singing) is surreal. Characters conduct real and imaginary Mamet-like conversations with each other in overlapping times and spaces. If spoken words fail them, they croon a tune and summon the hoofers for a production number when you least expect it.

The songs aren't exactly their own. You've got Gandolfini singing Tom Jones' "Delilah" -- mostly lip-synching -- and Sarandon doing the same with Janis Joplin's "Piece of My Heart" (in church, with a nun among her backup chorus). Springsteen's especially appropriate "Red-Headed Woman" kicks in karaoke-style, and James Brown's "It's a Man's World" similarly accompanies the action its lyrics reflect. It's a tongue-in-karaoke-cheek sort of singing.

The choreography is much the same: Gower Champion meets Twyla Tharp in the Sitcomedy Afterlife. Something between "Hello Dolly" and "Rent" is the aesthetic cross we have to bear, as firemen and policemen prance symmetrically while breaking up fights and rescuing distressed damsels on the job.

Notable moments: Nick gets a circumcision (and everyone sings about it). Winslet and Sarandon have a showdown of a catfight in a lingerie store. The funniest set piece is the visit of Elaine Stritch to son Nick in his hospital room -- ranting and raving at him as only an irate Mother Murder can. But highly enjoyable, too, is the Geek Chorus of Mandy Moore, Mary-Louise Parker and Aida Turturro in music-comic relief during the numbers and dispensing brickbats at their father on their mother's behalf. We've also got Steve Buscemi as Nick's riveter pal and the reliably bizarre Christopher Walken as Cousin Bo to liven up the proceedings.

Neither the Nick-Tula romance nor the degree of Kitty's rage is believable, of course, but what motivation in a musical plot ever was? He makes the mistake of making us want to take things seriously as well as satirically.

Turturro's strange audiovisual concept works brilliantly -- exactly once, late in the film -- during Winslet's beautiful underwater torch song, gorgeously filmed with her fiery red hair making all the right slo-motion shampoo-commercial moves.

"Romance & Cigarettes" is full of raunchy, righteous indignation (and might fill you with same). It is both delightfully original and disastrously ill-conceived -- a faux Broadway hybrid and curiosity piece of cult interest to aficionados of the Coen Brothers (who produced it) and to those more devoted to the Sound of Sopranos than of Music.

Rating: R for sexual content and strong language.

(Barry Paris can be reached at parispg48(at)aol.com.)

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