The Menu, a 2022 movie, now streaming. Written by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy. Directed by Mark Mylod. With Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Fiennes, John Lequizamo, Nicholas Hoult.
Bear with me. A little detour.
Atelier Crenn. A restaurant run by chef Dominique Crenn. San Francisco, currently awarded three Michelin stars.
Basically- they do French seafood, using molecular gastronomy and a whole bunch of other preparation tricks. You get a menu of poetry that allegedly describes each dish, and you eat what turns up.
Obviously, the food is good- Michelin does not give out stars easily, and three are almost unheard of.
But the whole approach is enraging.
From the pretentious website- which features not one, but two ballet dancers moving around a rocky shore, but which deigns to give little useful information save a link to the reservation requesting site- to the carefully deconstructed food served- essences of this, with foams and bubbles and so on- it's had my teeth clenched since I first read of Crenn and her restaurant.
I didn't understand why until I watched The Menu. I was fascinated by the pretension- this is food assembled on custom made plates with tweezers. Food where you can expect sea water slush to melt around your scallop and slightly flavor the barely steamed, locally sourced, hand picked bits of vegetable, clinging to the rock- from a local beach- on which it is all served. All meant to evoke something- a memory, a moment, a sense of money leaving your wallet, having paid for nonsense. Annoying, certainly. Over the top, over done. But enraging? Infuriating? My own reaction seemed as over the top as Crenn.
Then, The Menu. And I got it.
The Menu features Ralph Fiennes as the executive chef of the ultimate Crenn-ish restaurant, Hawthorn. Hawthorn exists - by itself- on a small coastal island.
The movie features a lot of artistically prepared and plated food. The restaurant looks very real- from the high end open kitchen to the uniforms worn by the staff to the architecture of the dining room. Fiennes moves through all exactly like the sort of chef he plays, by turns self effacing and dictatorial. The actors playing his staff act and react exactly as you would expect.
All of which is blue grey and cold. Distant and abstracted. The menu is filled with foams and gels and tiny bits of stuff here and there. Very little of it actually looks like food. It's more like paintings and sculpture than food. The military precision of the cooks and staff are immediately menacing.
Which is part of the point of The Menu.
The Menu is about what happens when food- and people- are deconstructed. When it all starts to lose its purpose- and becomes self referential. Hawthorn serves food that is disconnected from eating. From nourishment. It's there only for the experience it evokes. As are the diners.
It's dark stuff. I think it was meant to be a dark comedy, but, like the food and the people, it's a bit too refined to land with purpose. Top notch production- everything is well done. But it sort of, in the end, seems like a joke that's missing a punch line.
I am not implying that the story is incomplete. But the last scene tries to invoke the feeling of the last panel of an old EC Comic. That piss shiver of morbid delight. When what's got fits what's been coming, and Karma blows a kiss from her new Barbie Dreamhouse.
And it doesn't quite manage.
Because something in the movie just does not set that up.
To me?
It's a sense of fun. This sort of story cries out for some snark, some snicker, for someone in this mess, as things move along into conflict, to have a twinkle in their eye. No one does. Which lets things dip into maudlin, into drear. The story wants an in for the audience, a sympathetic character with whom we can relate. Humor would help define that character- and that character is there, I am trying to avoid spoilers- but is as sere and humorless as everyone else.
In other words- it takes itself too seriously.
Once it was over, I looked at the production credits. All the beautiful numb food-?
Dominque Crenn.
Oh, of course.
THAT, for me, is a better ending than what is in the movie. Finding out that the food, hell, the overall experience of Hawthorn, was crafted by exactly the sort of people whom the movie wants to stab with a fondue fork.
I think the movie was created by and for people who are utterly sick of the foodie bullshit. Of people stopping to photograph and catalog their food before taking a fork to it. Of people deconstructing everything into little abstract shapes and blobs that tell _stories_ and evoke memories. Of _experience_ dining. Of having a score of courses served to you and leaving the restaurant hungry.
That they got one of the leading practitioners of that kind of thing to set up their version of it? Had there been a way to work that into things, it would have been just the right note of droll humor.
Ah well.
5 of 10 points for the well observed, exacting recreation of Foodie Heaven, in Hawthorne. And another 3 for both Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy's performances. Final score, 8 of 10.
Errata:
The supporting cast in this is superbly chosen. It's a pity that they aren't given more to do, and that their back stories not more clearly indicated. Would have helped. We're meant to empathize with their plight, but the lack of character details- and one late in the game revelation- makes that extremely difficult.
A marriage is in trouble? An investment group is in trouble? The rich and famous actor is a bit desperate? One woman who turned up is not who was supposed to turn up?
Fine. But we need more information to care. And we don't really get it.
The old lady, sitting by herself through dinner service- just drinking. We find out who she is, late in the game. But we get no reaction from her- and as things move along, I think there should be a reaction. That really seems a waste to me. Because she- as is revealed- should absolutely understand where things are headed. And she could have some agency. Be able to gin up some conflict, some opposition.
I wonder if all of that - which, to me, seems clearly called for- is absent due to a desire to streamline the script?
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