Chef
Director: Jon Favreau
Cast: Jon Favreau, Sofía Vergara, John Leguizamo, Emjay Anthony
Length: 114 mins
Country: USA
After months of serving up the same familiar meals every evening, head chef Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) has become disillusioned with the way in which his boss (Dustin Hoffman) operates their Los Angeles restaurant, which Carl believes is stuck in a “creative rut”. Tensions come to a head with the combination of a visit from a particularly venomous food critic (Oliver Platt) and a snafu involving Carl’s lack of cyber-literacy. Fired and publicly humiliated, Carl eventually decides to return to basics by opening a food truck business, and his ex-wife (Sofía Vergara) convinces him that such an enterprise also presents an opportunity for the foodie to reconnect with his ten-year-old son, Percy (Emjay Anthony).
Favreau’s latest project is certainly a more intimate and character-driven affair than its predecessor (2011’s ham-fisted Cowboys & Aliens), and the writer-director has found firmer ground in the simpler material. The first half-hour of Chef makes for a strong opening, laying the table with a swift grace and getting the stakes in play with a pleasing efficiency. Carl’s workplace struggles are nicely shaded given the context of the director’s own recent creative frustrations, and the protagonist’s botched foray into the Twittersphere is deliciously funny to behold. By the time Carl has been kicked to the kerb at the end of the first act, Chef has successfully sold itself as a sharp and forthright comedy.
Sizzling to a suitably spicy soundtrack, the sight of Carl’s coterie whipping up a storm of consumer obsession is rather charming, and it’s commendable that Favreau manages to sidestep the cloying brand of sentimentality which so frequently subsumes films of this calibre. And of course, as food porn goes, the mouth-watering confections captured by cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau will have viewers leaving multiplexes with wildly rumbling tummies.
The remainder of the film – where the main arc of the storyline should surely find root – is more problematic, though the premise certainly whets the appetite. Carl goes his own way, renovating an ’88 Chevy into a state-hopping Cubano wagon, aided by his internet-savvy son, and ex-line cook Martin (a dependably breezy John Leguizamo). Though predictable, it is enjoyable to witness the reconciliation of father and son, and similarly hard to resist the feelgood pull of some of the film’s montage sequences. Sizzling to a suitably spicy soundtrack, the sight of Carl’s coterie whipping up a storm of consumer obsession is rather charming, and it’s commendable that Favreau manages to sidestep the cloying brand of sentimentality which so frequently subsumes films of this calibre. And of course, as food porn goes, the mouth-watering confections captured by cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau will have viewers leaving multiplexes with wildly rumbling tummies.
As such, when it catches its mojo, it’s easy to fall under Chef’s spell. Sadly, however, these moments are mere sparks peppering a meandering second half; one which fails to capitalise on the film’s promising opening. At 114 minutes, such supposedly modest material is stretched over a comparatively beefy runtime, and the strain shows in a number of fatty sequences which feel as though they could easily have been trimmed without sacrificing anything essential to the story. A particular offender in this case is Carl’s visit to his ex-wife’s ex-husband, portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. While it begins as a bit of wacky fun, the scene quickly descends into self-indulgence, wasting time by adding an unnecessary (and undeveloped) angle on the bond between Carl and his ex-wife. Additionally, when Carl leaves the restaurant behind, a lot of co-existing elements also become lost in the shuffle, with a number of promising character relationships cleared from the table before they’ve had a chance to fully resonate. Issues such as this make one wonder why some of the film’s considerable runtime was not spent focusing on more rewarding avenues, rather than descending into a conventional and ultimately disappointing denouement.
Early in the film, Favreau’s chef flies into a fit of rage against Platt’s disgruntled critic, and seethes over the fact that his work is so brusquely belittled with such flagrant disregard to the hard graft at its core. It’s similarly clear that a lot of love and effort went into the making of Chef, and such work shines through in a handful of decent payoffs. But for all its good intentions and moments of isolated greatness, the film’s inconsistency and lack of a keen edit obfuscate its strengths.
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