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.

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.

"What's Cooking" is yet another film which shows a short period of time in the lives of multiple disconnected characters who have something in common. In "Magnolia" the common denominator was proximity. In "All the Rage" it was guns. In "The Five Senses" is was senses. Etc. Etc. Etc. In "What's Cooking" it's food....Thanksgiving Day dinner.

"What's Cooking" has superb casting, direction, script/screenplay, etc. However it has one huge problem which it shares with other films of this ilk: Too many characters and too little time with which to develop them sufficient to create that all important bond with the audience. The result is a herky-jerky story flow and a disconnected audience which is reduced to pure voyeurism. Too busy and too superficial.

WHAT'S COOKING? (2000) ***1/2 Mercedes Ruehl, Joan Chen, Alfre Woodard, Kyra Sedgwick, Julianna Marguilies, Dennis Haysbert, Maury Chaykin, Lainie Kazan, Victor Rivers, Douglas Spain, A Martinez, Francois Chau, Will Yun Lee, Estelle Harris, Ralph Manza. Wonderful sleeper depicting four Los Angeles melting pot families all celebrating Thanksgiving, cross cutting between homes sharing the universal theme of family, love and ultimately acceptance of one another. Funny, emotional, intelligent and superbly acted with an equally impressive script by Gurinder Chadha (who directed) and Paul Mayeda Berges her real-life companion. Stand out performances especially by Ruehl, Chen & Woodard as strong-willed matriarchs and Sedgwick and Marguilies as one of the sexiest onscreen lesbian couples in some time. Kudos to the off-screen cooks who whip up some truly mouth-watering displays in uniquely different yet delicious dinners for the quartet broods.

Really wonderful movie about families and communities from different cultures and backgrounds gathering for Thanksgiving dinner. I thought that each of their stories were very interesting and showed how much each family could be dysfunctional in their own way. Would definitely recommend!