Jon Favreau (2014)

Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) is the head chef in a successful Los Angeles restaurant.  Carl is driven and passionate about continuing to create new dishes but, although anxious to succeed and firmly in charge of the kitchen, he’s not the martinet-cum-prima donna you might expect a screen chef to be.   However, his work is his life:  his marriage to the glamorous Inez (Sofía Vergara) has ended and, while he regularly sees their ten-year-old son Percy (Emjay Anthony), the boy senses that his father’s heart and mind are otherwise, culinarily engaged.   Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt), a food critic who strikes fear into chefs and restaurateurs but whose good reviews helped propel Carl’s career, is coming to dinner.  (The critic’s combination of names is nothing if not familiar to viewers of British television food programmes.)  Carl is eager to impress with new dishes but the restaurant owner Riva (Dustin Hoffman) wants him to stick to old favourites to keep the diners happy:  how would Carl feel, Riva asks, if he went to a Rolling Stones concert and they didn’t play ‘Satisfaction’?  Carl is disappointed and uneasy but he galvanises his team into action and, by the end of the evening, has forgotten entirely about his misgivings:  he looks up Michel’s online blog and starts reading the write-up to the others with complete confidence.  Michel’s verdict is damning.

While Carl used an iphone to find the review, it turns out that he knows nothing about social media or YouTube:  he doesn’t understand the difference between a text and a tweet so that, when he sends an aggrieved, aggressive message to Ramsey Michel through Twitter, Carl doesn’t realise how many people will see it.  He challenges Michel to return to the restaurant – to sample what Carl is really capable of – but, after having the same disagreement with Riva, Carl storms out of the kitchen, leaving the sous-chef Tony (Bobby Cannavale) to prepare for Michel the same food that the critic has already rubbished.  Carl reappears at Michel’s table during dessert and bawls him out for his cruelty; one of the other diners captures the exchange on his phone and the clip goes viral online.  Carl quits his job, can’t get another that he would want, and reluctantly accepts an invitation from Inez to go on a trip with her and Percy to Miami, Carl’s home city.  During their visit, Inez’s first ex-husband (Robert Downey Jr) offers to set Carl up with a food truck.  It’s in a dilapidated state but Carl, with the help of Percy, cleans it up.  When Martin (John Leguizamo), a junior cook from the LA restaurant, hears that Carl intends to start selling cubanos (Cuban sandwiches) from the truck, he leaves his job and arrives in Miami to work with his old boss.

This describes the first half of Chef.  There are signs from an early stage that the material is thin, with too many filler shots of food in preparation that are meant to express mood and feeling – an aphrodisiac pasta that Carl prepares for Molly (Scarlett Johansson), the hostess at Riva, and so on.  After less than an hour, it’s clear the film isn’t going to be about anything except Carl’s comeback as a chef and development as a father.  I couldn’t see how Jon Favreau could keep things going for another hour.  Once Carl’s ‘El Jefe’ food truck starts on the road from Miami back to LA, with several ports of call en route, Chef more or less comes to a halt.  The Cuban-inspired street food is great; Percy is keen and clued up enough to devise sustained online publicity for the food truck; and the journey is a virtually uninterrupted success story, uneventful in terms of incident and with no ups and downs in the relationships between characters.   You know the bonding of father and son is going to be a main feature of this road movie element but I wasn’t prepared for the falling-back-in-love of Carl and his ex-wife or for the revelation that Ramsey Michel is as nice as everyone else – to say the least:  once he’s sampled the food on sale from El Jefe, Michel offers to set up Carl up in a restaurant in Los Angeles and the film ends, some months later, with Carl and Inez’s remarriage taking place in this new restaurant.  (The only thing that prevents the rapprochement between Carl and Inez being completely ridiculous is that you’ve never believed how they got together in the first place.)  Chef ends happily for all concerned except Riva, Tony and Molly, who simply disappear.  It’s because Dustin Hoffman, Bobby Cannavale and Scarlett Johansson are all strong, and you want more of the characters they create, that their absence exposes more fully the weakness of the story.

Jon Favreau has got together a high-powered cast and supplied them with good naturalistic dialogue that’s often amusing, and which the actors make engaging, but the screenplay is full of holes.  It seems unlikely that a big-name restaurant critic would be on the receiving end of a set three-course menu but that’s what happens to Ramsey Michel on his return visit to Riva’s place – a set menu, that is, of the three dishes he loathed the first time.  The boy Percy (Emjay Anthony gives him a nice blend of sweetness and eccentricity) loves helping on the food truck and Carl thinks his son may be a cook in the making.  Percy wants to carry on working with his father once he goes back to his mother and to school in Los Angeles; in a short-lived downbeat scene near the end of the trip, Carl tells Percy that won’t be possible.  Once they’ve parted company, however, Carl watches the one-second-a-day video diary that his son has made of the El Jefe experience (as if he wouldn’t have watched it when Percy first completed the video) and changes his mind.  He phones and tells (the inexplicably friendless) Percy that he can continue to work at weekends and after school, once his homework’s done – and provided Inez agrees.  She does so instantly.  It’s possible the writer-director-star means to convince the audience of Chef that, with a bit of thought and goodwill, most everyone in the human race can get along fine but I think it’s more likely that the screenplay is lazy and egotistical.  The film has been favourably received and several reviews I’ve read suggest a parallel between Carl’s back-to-basics rebirth and Jon Favreau’s return, from directing things like the first two Iron Man movies, to his indie roots.  In order for this to resonate with the viewer, you obviously need to know who Favreau is.  The fact that I didn’t clearly made a difference but it seems arrogant for a film-maker to rely on this kind of background knowledge to give substance to his work.

One of the few sequences in Chef with any charge is Carl’s verbal assault on Ramsey Michel – and not just because it briefly threatens to become a physical one.  When Carl yells his outrage that Michel can, with a few, well-chosen vitriolic words, annihilate the chef’s tremendous efforts to design and deliver great food, he’s expressing the creative talent’s frustration and fury with the professional critic in any medium (even if there’s something peculiarly alienating about food critics – they’re consumers in a particularly literal sense and can therefore be seen as spewing their unkind words).   But even this bit of the film is weakened in retrospect – both by Michel’s turning out all right in the end and by the suspicion that Jon Favreau means you to see his own story in Carl Casper’s.    One further whinge:  this is the third American film I’ve seen in the space of a few weeks (after Fruitvale Station and The Fault in Our Stars) to show texts and/or tweets on screen as a narrative device.  This is going to be a stylistic cliché even sooner than I expected.

16 July 2014