Chef
16/4/2014
Director: Jon Favreau
Writer: Jon Favreau
Starring: Jon Favreau, Scarlett Johansson, Sofia Vergara, John Leguizamo, Robert Downey Jr
Carl Caspar (Jon Favreau) is a celebrity chef at a trendy L.A. restaurant, but he is creatively stifled by his boss, who wants him to keep cooking the same dishes he has for the last five years. In a moment of frustration Carl has a meltdown in front of a famous food critic at the restaurant, and the footage goes viral. Having left his job, and with no new offers on the table, he maxes out his credit cards to buy a food truck and journey across the country with his sous chef (John Leguizamo) and his son.
This was a charming film. It says a lot about the state of comedy today that I kept expecting things to go disastrously wrong for the characters. I’m glad that it was more of a journey for Carl to get in a good emotional place, rather than an exercise in seeing how much abuse he can suffer from the universe. The film was structured fairly unusually, with two distinct halves. In the first part of the film we see Carl’s monotonous life in LA, which builds to the meltdown. In the latter section, we see him buy the food truck (from Robert Downey Jr., in a cameo role) and travel across the country while bonding with his son. All the food was lovingly filmed, but the gratuitous food porn was definitely not aimed at vegetarians such as myself. Also, some of the editing could have been a little tighter, as some of the scenes and jokes went on slightly too long.
The cast were all really strong in their roles. A number of the scenes felt heavily improvised, (particularly those between the three chefs in the restaurant and the scene with Robert Downey Jr) and it was clear that the actors had excellent chemistry together. Carl’s bond with his son (Emjay Anthony) formed the core emotional content of the film, and the two of them really felt natural together. Sadly, none of the female roles were very fleshed out. Scarlet Johansson disappeared halfway through the film, never to be seen again. And Ines (Sofia Vergara) played an important role in encouraging Carl, but she was essentially reduced to a device to initiate Carl’s journey. And I didn’t feel that the wedding at the end was an earned emotional payoff. It felt fairly arbitrary.
This was clearly a smaller budget independent film, despite the big names attached. Jon Favreau seemed to collect a cast he had worked with before on other projects to help him bring what I can only assume is a passion project to fruition. It looked great, for all of that, and had a colour and liveliness to it that is not often found in smaller projects. The soundtrack helped in that regard, as the songs chosen were all high-energy and added such a sense of joy to the scenes.
Highlight: Definitely the music, though I did think that the relationship between Carl and his son was lovely.
Score: 7.5/10
Tags:
Comments
—————
—————