Cookin’ up something
Chef, Jon Favreau’s love letter to eating, is not very realistic. But it is quite endearing.
Although some foodies claim the film to be a realistic portrayal of life in the restaurant biz, how realistic can it be, really, when Favreau — whose personality is nearly always buried on the back burner, consumed as he is with tomorrow’s menu — bags not only Sofia Vergara (playing the most nurturing ex-wife in history) but Scarlett Johansson, too, as a side dish?
How realistic can it be when Favreau, playing gifted chef Carl Casper, quits his LA restaurant job to run a food truck in Miami, and his just-promoted pal Martin (John Leguizamo) quits his own new, more lucrative position to join him in a fledgling food business (plus he conveniently speaks Spanish to translate for the locals)?
I mean, how realistic is it when your arch-nemesis, a food blogger critic, ends up bankrolling your new business?
Not too realistic. But Favreau’s film is realistic in its love of food and its preparation. And that’s what really matters.
Chef Casper is so focused on making good food that we are treated to loving montages of him carving up fresh pig for the restaurant’s dinner menu (“Lechon!” drools sous chef Bobby Cannavale). We see him preparing incredible grilled cheese sandwiches for his son Percy (Emjay Anthony), and mouthwatering plates of pasta for his gal pal Molly (ScarJo), who’s watching him cook while curled up on a bed that’s conveniently located right next to his stove! What killer technique this guy Casper has!
Unfortunately, his boss, resto owner Riva (Dustin Hoffman), doesn’t want Casper branching out. He doesn’t like “weird” food on the menu and wants Casper to stick to the tried-and-tested crowd pleasers. “When you score Rolling Stones tickets, do you want Mick Jagger to not sing Satisfaction?” is how Riva puts it.
But when Casper caves in to the boss, he’s given a snotty putdown review by Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt), an online food critic. This sparks a hilarious war of words on Twitter, an application that Casper doesn’t have the first clue about (fortunately his son, as all techie kids do nowadays, explains it to him).
Casper wants the freedom to cook what he wants, but doesn’t want to take the advice of his unbelievably sweet ex-wife Inez (Vergara), who urges him to buy a food truck and hit the road. Casper also gives his son short shrift in the “dad” department, and these two “conflicts” are pretty much the substance of Chef. That and Casper’s decision to “go deep within” and relearn why he loved cooking in the first place are the main narrative bumps in the road.
The rest is just sheer fun, with Favreau and Leguizamo restoring a junked-up catering truck (donated by weird-by-numbers benefactor Robery Downey Jr.) and getting his son Percy to help clean the thing up.
The food scenes are appetizing as hell. You really can’t argue with fresh pork sandwiches. Or scoring fried beignets in New Orleans. Watching Favreau, who’s no waif, brush on thick layers of butter — when he’s not smoking cigars and glugging down beers — you can’t help thinking: uh-oh, Cardiac City. But after all, part of loving food is experiencing food in all its permutations. Watching Favreau and Leguizamo bond over a piece of roasted pork, sticking their meaty paws in the sauce like cavemen digging the first cooked meal, is almost cathartic. And it will make you hungry.
As noted, there are only a few minor conflicts driving this movie, and the main one is about self-confidence and believing in yourself. It’s a good message, one which many people have embraced in an age where the gold retirement watch is no longer guaranteed. Casper has to learn to dump his prestigious chef’s job and start again from scratch. It helps that he has an adoring son who wants to learn how to cook and endlessly documents their journey on social media. This sparks viral interest.
One, too, can applaud Favreau, who’s also reinvented himself, first making a mark as writer/director/actor in Swingers, then going on to join Hollywood’s A-list of directors with blockbusters like Iron-Man. It’s refreshing to see that he can still dig inside and find a story he really wants to tell as a director — a smaller story, one that doesn’t follow every chapter of the Syd Field screenwriting handbook. I mean, there are through lines here — the subplot about his ex-wife, and his alienated son — but to completely leave out a big, fake Hollywood “conflict” in Chef means that Favreau has enough faith in his material. He doesn’t need a constructed crisis to drive the movie. The characters manage on their own, because you can see yourself in chef Casper, with his beefy arms decorated in tats, and his complete shock and disbelief that bloggers can be so “hurtful.” He acts the way most adults do, in this confusing, rapidly changing world.
Is it true to life? Well, yes and no. As mentioned, there are enough angels and helpers along the way to make you think this is a fairy tale straight out of Disney. But people do reinvent themselves all the time. They learn to harness what they love and what makes them tick, and they do have second acts. Chef reminds us how appealing and invigorating that kind of experience can be.
