Food steals the show
Despite some excellent performances from the cast, the superbly prepared meals may be the abiding memory of this movie
and comes near to throwing up; and hurls plates and dishes at the wall.
This Gordon Ramsay stuff might strike one as the flopped soufflé of cliché. But (to admit a personal interest) I have a niece who, since she was a teen, was so enraptured by TV presentations of the inner life of top kitchens that she determined to become a chef — and told me that such animosities and jealousy are normal behind the clean façade of diligence and professionalism that top eateries stage up front. (She’s now an exquisite chef at a R17 000/night game lodge in the Kruger National Park.)
Another facet of Jones’s sociopathic perfectionism is that he cannot control the rage that bubbles up (as in a geyser) thanks to his warped childhood; and this leads him to drink and drugs and catastrophe when he causes a Parisian restaurant to fail. This predates the actual film — we first see him clean, sober, and under tenuous self-control in London, where his ambition has become focused on opening his own establishment and striving for a coveted three-star Michelin rating, whereas in France he was restricted to two.
It’s not long before he’s resorting to flaming tirades and food-tossing. He has new staff — Miller, who adores him, Brühl, his gentle mâitre d’, who funds and loves him — and assorted aspirants who survive and learn from him, since the consensus is that he’s a flawed genius. He also has enemies — Sy, who resents what he did in Paris, and Rhys, who is consoling when he sees Jones about to resurrect his personal demons. Bit parts go to Thurman, Vikander (as his ex) and Thompson (his doctor and part-time shrink to help him keep clean).
In all, however, though Cooper (who was in last year’s American Sniper with Miller) naturally occupies most of the screen time, it’s the gathering, preparation, presentation and serving of magnificent food that will be an avenue to heaven for lovers of food porn (not my phrase). If Burnt can be classified as a romcom (though the comedy and the romance are thin) then the ineffable object of desire is the superbly prepared meal.
Such narratives are in danger of becoming (pun ahead) cinematic staples. From Ratatouille (an animation in which rats magnify the intensity and drama of the cooking space) to The Hundred-Foot Journey (in which Asian exiles assault traditional French bourgeois cuisine) the primal instinct to eat well — for centuries a royal prerogative — is a eye-fest for the audiences. They will find their hunger pangs nigh assuaged by the glittering, non-vegetarian dishes served up by obsessed and frequently attractive people.
As Jones, Cooper turns in a subtle and almost sympathetic performance. I say “almost” because there are moments when the actor loses sway over his racked emotions and threatens to entirely pop his cork — almost as if he thought the posttraumatic stress disorder displayed in American Sniper was appropriate for a falling-down cook. Fortunately, these lapses are few: and he ingests the moral of the film — that a gourmet kitchen is, or could be, a form of family to soothe his brow and steady him to face the challenges of sobriety in its widest sense.