What's Cooking?

What a grand idea - to celebrate America and also to highlight cultural diversity, let's have an African-American, Hispanic, Jewish, and Vietnamese family all meet at Thanksgiving with their own turkey feast. "What's Cooking" starts out as a meaningful discourse on our ethnic differences but ends up as a superficial, patronizing mess. Using food as a focal point, "What's Cooking" could have reveal much about the importance of family to these four cultures. Instead, we are treated to silly plots (do you really believe all four families lived in the same block) and four equally sanitized endings to some very difficult contemporary problems - acculturation, same-sex relationships, infidelity, and racial prejudice. The filmmakers also casted big name stars in misplaced roles to gain commercial success at the risk of losing its credibility - Joan Chen as Vietnamese, Mercedes Ruehl as Hispanic, and Kyra Sedgwick and Julianna Margulies as a lesbian couple. You think back on "Babette's Feast", "Like Water for Chocolate", and "The Big Night" and you feel connected to food as an overpowering statement on human passion and compassion. In "What's Cooking", food is treated no better than the commercial that adorns the city bus. Fittingly the film takes places in Los Angeles where people there could stomach this Pablum as real food. Fortunately, for the rest of us, we can spot a fake even if it looks like an old-fashioned turkey.

Holidays are a time for families to come together. More often than not, these little "reunions" manage to bring out the worst in people and unpleasant episodes from the past get dredged up and brutally dissected for the thousandth time. Or your parents may take turns pushing your buttons (which of course they programmed in the first place) and endlessly aggravating you with a never-ending barrage of life questions. "When are you getting married?" "When are we getting grandchildren?" "What do you intend to do with your life?" Small wonder that the suicide rate increases exponentially around these times of joy.

Rather than limit herself to one family's deluge of dysfunctional dialogue at Thanksgiving, writer/director Gurminder Chadha, zooms in on a multi-family multicultural view of the holiday. We are introduced to the Jewish family with the lesbian daughter and her lover, the Hispanic family with the philandering husband and newly liberated wife, the cross-generational Vietnamese family's struggle with old traditions vs. new realities, and the successful yet fractured African American family. Happy holidays!

Unlike "The Big Night" where food is intended to inspire pure sensory decadence, or "Like Water for Chocolate" in which it takes on a mystical, magical quality, Chadha's uses food to illuminate the contrasts between the families in the piece. While turkey is served as the main course at every dinner table, it is prepared, cooked and presented very differently by each family. The roasted polenta, fajitas, spring rolls and homemade macaroni and cheese that supplant the side dishes typically associated with Thanksgiving - corn, cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes - further enhance the feeling (and reminded me that I had missed dinner). But movies do not live by food alone.

What sets this film apart from its contemporaries is not its parallel, intertwining plots, or the setting, but its execution. Any of the plots could easily provide enough fodder for a full-length movie, which makes their skillful amalgamation in 106 minutes that much more impressive. This is more remarkable when one takes into account that no one in the voluminous (there are dozens of speaking parts) and talented ensemble cast is there as window dressing - every character is solid and has a clearly defined purpose. Rarer still is the fact that the lion's share of screen time is devoted to the development of strong female characters, which might explain what drew Mercedes Ruehl, Julianna Marguelies and Joan Chen to the project. My praise has not yet ended.

The dialogue is realistic and well written, and the situations, though sometimes tongue-in-cheek, familiar and believable. The pacing is quick, slowing down to take a breather only when the audience needs it, but never leaves the viewer behind. The editing is tight and clean, rarely allowing any one scene to run too long. Finally, the cinematographer deserves congratulations for the exceptionally sumptuous food shots, I swear I could smell the turkey. In movies, as in life however, nothing is perfect.

The movie does lapse into stereotypes in several instances, for example, could anyone be as truly annoying and clueless as the character of Aunt Bea (played to wonderful excess by Estelle Harris)? I hope not. The film also goes to the sentimentality well a little too often and the ending, while clever, is contrived. While noticeable, these flaws are merely mildly distracting, and do not overwhelm the film.

As the saying goes, I laughed, I cried, I cringed, it was an experience. * Make reservations to catch this delectable dish as soon as it's served up at your local theater.

*I didn't actually cry, I just got a little something in my eye.

This movie is a comedy about the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. It follows four families (black, Latino, Jewish, and Vietnamese) during their holiday celebrations, with all the messes that crop up during big family gatherings. Each of the families has its own problems, which are to some extent intertwined.

An example of one of the family messes: A young man in the Latino family bumps into his father (who had moved out some time earlier) at the grocery store, and invites him to Thanksgiving dinner. His mother is furious, because she doesn't want anything to do with her estranged husband, particularly during a big holiday event.

The acting and directing are very good, but the writing and editing are really wonderful. The cast is huge, but the editing manages to make it easy for the audience to keep track of everyone. It's full of laughs (and some light drama), but aside from some stereotyping, mostly realistic. Even though there are quite a number of name actors, the screen time is divided among the cast to fit the story, not to fit the actors' egos -- an impressive balancing act for the director and producers.

The food scenes, aside from a few kitchen disasters, were enough to inspire quite an appetite. It's a good thing the Seattle International Film Festival scheduled the screening in the afternoon, so I could have dinner right after the movie.

This is one of the best recent comedies I've seen.

We've had AMERICAN PIE, AMERICAN BEAUTY, and AMERICAN PSYCHO. This is AMERICAN STEW.

The film is entertaining as it mixes drama and comedy into an interesting recipe. To use other metaphors, the film is the American tossed salad or mixing bowl. We see four quite different families experiencing Thanksgiving day in seemingly different ways. But underneath, we see also the similarities of the joys, pains, and struggles as the various families deal with the reality hidden beneath the holiday veneer.

As the family members connect with and disconnect from each other and with members of the other families, the surface is pulled away, and we see what is really underneath the pleasantries and polite facades. This is a very accurate depiction of the sadness and humor that surround family holidays, and the film might be a good thing to watch just before or during such holidays. We see ourselves reflected in the mirror of the movie and can learn that holidays can be hilarious pains.

Funny, charming, sad, and completely entertaining throughout.... a very talented ensemble cast...some surprises in the story. This is, I think, a holiday classic. I look forward to seeing it again and again.