by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Friday night’s North Park Movie Night was held in the parking
lot outside the North Park Theatre in
San Diego, and featured a movie showing, a beer garden, some music (the flyer
for the event promised a D.J. but he played mostly 1970’s-era funk jazz and
items like T. Rex’s “Jeepster” instead of the cold, anonymous, annoying “dance
music” of today) and a cocktail-tasting contest in which five judges were
supposed to taste-test the work of eight bartenders from local North Park
establishments — and the winner was from Wang’s, a place I’d always thought of
as a Chinese restaurant and had had no idea they even had
a cocktail bar. The preliminaries of this event were a bit of a trial for me
but the movie was worth the wait; it was called Chef, was released earlier this year (May 30) by a couple
of independent companies called Aldamisa Entertainment and Kilburn Media, and
was an auteur triumph for Jon
Favreau, who wrote, directed and starred. Favreau plays chef Carl Casper, who
ten years earlier had been a hotshot food star in Miami and had won the Food
& Wine award for best chef of the year,
but currently he’s running a restaurant in L.A. for owner Riva (Dustin Hoffman)
and he’s creatively burned out, largely due to Riva’s insistence that the
cuisine at his restaurant remain permanent and unchanging so as to avoid
disappointing the regular customers.
For the first reel or so it’s strikingly
reminiscent of Big Night (1996),
also a film about a restaurant co-directed and co-written by its star, Stanley
Tucci, in which the family running a fading Italian restaurant gamble on a
supposed visit by Louis Prima and decide to cook a special meal for him so
he’ll spread the word that this is a fabulous place to dine and they’ll attract
the customers they need to stay in business. (If it had been a 1930’s movie
someone would have sought out the big star and brought him to the restaurant,
but because this was a 1990’s movie, albeit set in 1959, the cooks make their
fabulous dinner, Prima never shows and the restaurant goes out of business.) In
Chef the man whose presence,
absence or opinion can make or break the restaurant isn’t a music star; he’s a
food reviewer and blogger, Ramsay Michel (Oliver Platt), and he was one of
Casper’s original boosters 10 years earlier. Casper has worked out a stunning
new lineup of dishes to serve the feared critic, but at the last minute Riva
shows up and demands that Casper serve only the most tried-and-true items on
the menu. “Look, if you bought Stones tickets and Jagger didn't play
‘Satisfaction,’ how would you feel? Would you be happy?” Riva explains. “No!
You'd burn the place to the fucking ground.” Alas, Ramsay Michel is not like a
Rolling Stones fan who wants to hear only their greatest hits from the 1960’s;
instead he writes a snotty review that not only gets posted to his blog but
“goes viral” on the Internet. A divorcé with a 10-year-old son named Percy
(Emjay Anthony) and a Latina ex-wife named Inez (Sofia Vergara) who before she
hooked up with Casper was married to an eccentric Miami-based entrepreneur
named Marvin (Robert Downey, Jr., in what according to imdb.com is his first
collaboration with Favreau apart from the Iron Man movies), Casper doesn’t understand what “going
viral” means until his son explains it to him. Casper asks Percy to set up a
Twitter account for him, and Casper uses it to send what he thinks is a private
message to Ramsay Michel but which actually goes public and starts an intense
flame war.
Ramsay announces he’s going to re-review the restaurant, and Casper
works his ass off to concoct a new slate of super-dishes to make the most jaded
foodie’s palate water — only once again Riva shows up at the last minute and
demands that Casper cook the same-old same-old Ramsay has already slammed in
his previous review. So Casper walks out on the job and leaves his second- and
third-in-command, Martin (John Leguizamo) and Tony (Bobby Cannavale), in charge
in the kitchen — and when Ramsay learns that Casper didn’t show up on the Big
Night he posts a tweet that Casper didn’t have the guts to face him again.
Casper reads that online, shows up at the restaurant and vents his spleen at
Ramsay. We see the tell-tale signs that his rant is about to go viral when
people hold up their smartphones and little blue lights go on indicating that they’re
video-recording it — and unlike Rick Santelli’s infamous CNBC rant that started
the Tea Party, this one doesn’t do anything but kill Casper’s career stone-dead
and make it impossible for him to get a job at any other restaurant. Inez tries
to help by introducing him to a publicist, Jen (Amy Sedaris, David Sedaris’
sister), who says she can get Casper onto a food-based “reality TV” show called
Hell’s Kitchen, but Casper is
appalled by the prospect. Instead Inez arranges for Marvin in Miami to meet with
Casper — but all Marvin is willing to do for him is give him an ancient, dirty
food truck to clean up and outfit for the Miami streets. Martin bolts Riva’s
restaurant in L.A. to work as Casper’s sous-chef aboard the truck, and Percy
agrees to spend the summer helping his dad — and the three of them, aided by a
friend of Martin’s who gives the food truck a fancy décor job and the name El
Jefe (“The Chief”), give a new spin to the
traditional Cubano sandwiches and
other items on their menu. They travel cross-country, including a stop in New
Orleans, with Percy serving as their online publicist and sending a series of
tweets explaining that their increasingly legendary food truck is coming to
your city and you shouldn’t miss the opportunity to dine there. They finally
make it back to L.A., where Casper reluctantly gives his son the job of working
with the food truck on evenings and weekends — and he also gets another shot at
a restaurant from an unlikely (but, as long as you’ve seen enough other movies
first, predictable) source: Ramsay Michel, who’s sold his food blog for “a ton
of money” and is willing to stake Casper to an El Jefe restaurant where he can cook whatever he wants.
Chef may not seem like much in synopsis — the plot
gimmick of a former superstar losing his mojo and then getting it back through
experiences that humble him and teach him the real meaning of love and humanity
isn’t exactly the freshest idea for a movie, and neither is the one about the
divorced dad who wasn’t much of a parent to his kid when he and the mother were
together and hasn’t been doing any better at it since the breakup either —
but, once past that somewhat draggy first reel, it’s a sheer delight, a
screwball comedy for modern times and one of the few recent films (along with Little
Miss Sunshine, Stranger than Fiction and Kabluey) that not only have been comedies “in form and
intent” but have actually been genuinely funny. Chef is warm and appealing, the characters are people we
genuinely like and want to see succeed (about the only extraneous person in the
film is Molly, who works at Riva’s restaurant, apparently as head of the
waitstaff, and is having a desultory affair with Casper at the beginning before
both he and the film leave her behind; she seems to exist in the story only so
Scarlett Johansson can add her talents to an already formidable cast), the
growing father-son bond between Casper and Percy is well portrayed and Jon
Favreau proves adept at the triple-threat task of writer, director and star.
Another point I’d like to make about it is it’s a movie that conveys the sheer
delight of cooking; the shots of Favreau and the other cast members actually
preparing food take on an almost sensual aspect that's fun to watch (and makes you want to crack open a recipe book and try something more adventurous in the kitchen than your usual fare). Chef isn’t a film I would have sought out or expected
much from, but it turned out to be a real delight, an invigorating evening at a
time when I really needed one!
