Massimo

As a young boy, once I started daydreaming about my future I took quiet satisfaction in the fact that I didn’t have to share my birthday--February 19-- with anyone enormously famous. No easy feat given my parents’ proclivity for producing babies on auspicious dates…my brother Tim has to share his birthday with JFK; brother Cliff shares his with Jesus...as does wife Lorna and her twin sister Lorraine! How can you even begin to think of being a president or Messiah with such lofty figures as those already dominating the calendar? My dear old friend John Douglas--born February 12, exactly one week before me--has had to share his birthday with Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Although that dynamic birthday duo shows that two great figures can indeed occupy the same date on the calendar, I personally would’ve found it too humbling for aspiration’s sake to be born then and may have just quit on my dreams. But with February 19 free and clear, I always felt the date was open for me to put my mark on it.
Massimo Troisi was also born on February 19. Already I can hear the head scratching his name invokes echoing through the Intertubes, thus reassuring me that the date is still mine to patent. Massimo was the star of Il Postino, one (if not THE one) of my all-time favorite movies. Massimo plays Mario, the meek son of a fisherman on an island full of fishermen and fishermen’s wives. When we’re first introduced to Mario he’s in his room dreamily fondling a postcard from relatives in America. As he later fights off his father’s urging to get a job with weak excuses, it’s easy to perceive Mario as lazy. Lazy, that is, unless you’re a fellow dreamer, and then you know that it’s not work that Mario seeks to avoid, but the surrender of dreams to work. My bond with Massimo/Mario begins right there since I had a father of my own, a weaver in the local carpet mill, who sometimes grew impatient with how dedicated I was to just weaving dreams in my room. At 16 I made a life-long promise to myself to avoid any job that came between me and my passions and dreams--a promise I rather skillfully managed to keep through most of my working life. Mario seems to follow my path. He takes an undemanding job as a part-time postman despite its meager wages just to satisfy his father’s demand that he find work.
Because the job does not force foreclosure on his compulsive woolgathering, Mario is open and available at the transformative moment of his life…his meeting with Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet in exile who has come to Mario’s obscure Italian island to wait out his government’s indictment of him. Neruda, a rare man of arts in Mario’s world, exposes the barely literate postman up to the power of words. Mario, early on in their relationship, responds to Neruda’s famous line, “It so happens/I’m tired of being a man” by confiding that he, too, is sometimes tired of being a man. The poem that is home to that line, Walking Around , easily reveals why it speaks so clearly to Mario:

I don’t want to go on being just a root in the shadows,
 vacillating, extended, shivering with dream,
 down in the damp bowels of earth,
 absorbing it, thinking it, eating it every day./I don’t want to be so much misfortune,
 I don’t want to go on as a root or a tomb,
 a subterranean tunnel, just a cellar of death, 
frozen, dying in pain./This is why, Monday, the day, is burning like petrol,
 when it sees me arrive with my prison features, 
and it screeches going by like a scorched tire 
and its footsteps tread hot with blood towards night.

Soon Mario is attempting to use metaphors himself--as taught to him by Neruda--to woo Beatrice, the tavern girl and niece of the tavern keeper, Donna Rosa.

Donna Rosa: What did he say to you?
Beatrice: Metaphors.
Donna Rosa: I never heard such big words from you. What metaphors did he do to you?
Beatrice: He didn’t do them to me; he said them. Metaphors are words.
Donna Rosa: Words are the worst thing ever. I'd prefer a drunkard at the bar touching your bum to someone who says your smile flies like a butterfly.
Beatrice: Spreadslike a butterfly. 

Il Postino begs to be a companion feature for a classroom or film series on communication with Sofia Coppola’s exquisite Lost in Translation. Whereas Coppola’s little masterpiece examines the many ways we fail to communicate (preserving the one clarifying act of communication for a final exchange…whispered and out of audience hearing), Il Postino shows the many ways human communication can illuminate our existence.
Oddly when I saw Il Postino in a movie theater, quite the opposite of illumination happened. Il Postino introduces Mario’s boss at the post office as a communist (like Neruda himself), and the guy watching from the row in front of me stood up and yelled at the screen, “Fucking communists!” He then grabbed his shocked date by the arm, pulled her up out of her seat and angrily led her out of the theater. It's a jarring and incongruous memory to hold for such an irrepressibly gentle movie…ironic, too, in that the movie that beat out Il Postino for best picture in 1995 was Braveheart, which glorified violent action by the collective against the "One Percent" of the time, but elicited no such outbursts among its many millions of viewers as far as I know. Words, perhaps, are mightier than swords.
There's further irony in that the climatic suffering of Braveheart’s William Wallace--as played to masochistic excess by Mel Gibson--is such over-the-top movie-making hokum, while Massimo, suffering in real life with a fatal heart condition, turned in the truly heroic performance as Mario. There are many things that make Il Postino a beautiful film—smooth direction; enchanting Mediterranean scenery; a lovely, Oscar-winning soundtrack; a bright, intelligent screenplay (co-witten by Massimo) full of sweet comic moments and rich human insights; and a charming supporting cast...not least of whom is Maria Grazia Cucinotta as Beatrice, poetry in motion personified (and not reed-thin haiku, but grand, voluptuous Whitmanesque poetry). Above all, however, is Massimo, who undertook the role with a deep understanding that it would probably cost him his life…and it did. The fragility of his health permeates and elevates his performance, and sadly placed him among a handful of actors (Spencer Tracy, Peter Finch, James Dean, for three) to be nominated for a best actor Oscar after his death. 
One can never know these things for sure, but I’m guessing that if Massimo, like Mario, hadn’t been following his passion…his dreams…it is unlikely he would’ve risked his life for any other job.  Allora…on further reflection maybe there was a great man born on February 19. Happy birthday to us, Massimo/Mario, por favor.