John Wells (2015)

A screenplay by Steven Knight (Locke); Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller again, soon after their success together in American Sniper:  there are good reasons for seeing Burnt – until you see it.  This is the story of a chef, Adam Jones (Cooper) – brilliant, temperamental, thoroughly screwed up.  He was the rising star of a Michelin-starred Paris kitchen until drinks, drugs and a relationship with the daughter of the restaurant’s legendary head chef brought about Adam’s downfall.  Since then, he’s been in weird, self-imposed purdah – working in an oyster bar, where he resolved to shuck one million bivalves.  Job done, Adam moves to London, intent on getting three Michelin stars under his own steam.  He becomes head chef at the Langham Hotel:  Tony (Daniel Brühl), the maître d’hôtel, is an old acquaintance.  Since the Paris cataclysm, Adam has given up alchohol, narcotics and sex but he’s not improved by abstinence, as evidenced by his loco megalomaniac behaviour in the Langham kitchen.

The received idea of the genius chef is now a man (it must be a man) who demands of himself and his staff nothing less than perfection, a short-fused stickler for kitchen discipline, a borderline tyrant.   The image derives as much from the endless parade of formidable culinary maestros on Masterchef-like TV shows as from fictional screen chefs.  It’s taken hold, though, to the extent that the characterisation of Adam Jones, his rivalry with Reece (Matthews Rhys), another star chef in the London gourmet firmament, and the presentation of their line of work as a virtual blood sport are entirely unsurprising.   Adam’s journey to personal redemption is similarly and dismally predictable.  Burnt is the latest instance of film-makers relying on a tired formula but appearing to assume that, if the protagonist is exceedingly unpleasant and there’s plenty of violently abusive language (and a pinch or two of physical violence), the material will thereby be given new meaning.  All it means, in effect, is that sitting waiting for the formula to be worked out isn’t in the least enjoyable.  (Manglehorn was another recent example.)  People in the Richmond Odeon laughed during Burnt but the laughter sounded like a desperate attempt to prove to themselves they were being entertained.  The laughter had a kind of can-you-believe-this-guy edge at moments when Adam was being especially obnoxious.  You can’t believe this guy:  and viewers’ understandable reluctance to take him seriously exposes the pointlessness of how Adam is presented by John Wells and Steven Knight (whose screenplay is from a story by Michael Kalesniko).   It’s necessary, of course, that Adam discovers, through the love of a good woman, there’s more to life than three Michelin stars but, to be on the feelgood safe side, the film ends up with his getting the girl and the three stars (and they are not because Adam’s cooking improves when he does).

Bradley Cooper appears to have been persuaded there’s depth to find in the character of Adam:  he spends the film on a morose wild good chase.   (His voice is more sensitive when Adam speaks, as he occasionally does, in French but I wondered if Cooper felt the sensitivity just went with the language.)  As his salvation, the feisty, long-suffering Helene (she’s also a talented chef), Sienna Miller delivers a respectable performance in a poor role.  Ditto Daniel Brühl in a role that’s worse than poor.  (Tony fancies Adam:  his feelings aren’t reciprocated but, late on in the film, the alpha-male protagonist plants a ‘comical’ smacker on Tony’s lips – the punchline to the film’s smirking at his pitiableness.)  Alicia Vikander makes a brief but, thanks to her extraordinary beauty, memorable appearance as Anne Marie, the French restaurateur’s daughter with whom Adam once shared a bed and a drugs habit.  In London, she pays the drugs debts he still owes and thus prevents his getting done over more than once by a couple of heavies.  (It would have been a better joke than any there actually are in the film if this pair hanging round the Langham had turned out to be the Michelin assessors.)  Anne Marie’s father, now dead, has bequeathed his kitchen knives to his former protégé although, when she offers these to Adam, Bradley Cooper looks as if he might use them to slice up something other than food.  Omar Sy is Michel, a former colleague who wants to work again with Adam in spite of the latter’s disgraceful treatment of him in their Paris days.  Michel’s motive turns out to be revenge:  the revelation of how he takes this revenge drew audible gasps from behind me in the Odeon but I wasn’t sure if these were expressions of sarcasm.  It will be clear that John Wells has managed to involve a high-powered international cast.  It also includes Riccardo Scamarcio (in a negligible part), Uma Thurman and Emma Thompson.  I missed Thurman:  I must have been drowsing during her time on screen.   I wish I’d been unconscious during Thompson’s smug, annoying appearance as Adam’s doctor-cum-therapist.

Burnt has been badly received by critics and has a bit to go to recoup its $20m budget but there were plenty of people at the show I saw.  I wondered if this had as much to do with the popularity of cookery programmes on television as of Bradley Cooper et al.  In any case, I’m sure the audience was better informed than some of the characters:  one of Adam’s team at the Langham requires an explanation of the Michelin star system; Adam himself is accused early on by Helene of being out-of-date, a charge that’s proved when he seems never to have heard of sous vide.  (Later on, he uses a plastic bag from the water bath paraphernalia to try and self-asphyxiate …)  John Wells, whose direction is remarkably unimaginative, pads things out with repeated montages of high-pressure kitchen action:  these are pure cliché – no more than a big-budget version of what you see in Masterchef.  The often great-looking dishes are designed by real-life top chef Marcus Wareing (his Michelin star count is currently one less than Adam Jones’s).  Wareing is now well advanced on his own journey from kitchen martinet towards becoming a more genial and popular small-screen personality.  His continuing insistence on high standards may, however, cause him to regret having his name on the credits of a movie as lousy as Burnt.

8 November 2015