THE MENU: immune from pretension

Photo caption: Ralph Fiennes and Ana Taylor-Joy in THE MENU. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

The darkly funny horror film The Menu is a battle of wits set in absurd foodieism. This isn’t the kind of horror film with a lot of jump scares, although one sudden event shocks and disgusts the diners (though some think that it’s all part of the show). The Menu builds a sense of dread, a situation where it looks like survival is impossible.

Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) presides over a restaurant on its own island in the Pacific Northwest, with its own carefully curated gardens and aquaculture and a staff as cultish as The People’s Temple. The restaurant has 12 seats and each evening’s prix fixe goes for $1250.

Slowik seems like a self-important and officious kitchen tyrant, but unsettlingly high strung. That signals, and this is really not a significant spoiler, that he’s a balls out psycho intending to slaughter all his guests.

Creepily, it is revealed that tonight’s customers have been carefully selected by Slowik. The one exception is Margot (Ana Taylor-Joy), the last minute substitute date of Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) an obsequious celebrity chef groupie.

I’m a foodie myself; after all, I named my blog The Movie Gourmet. But, as much as I enjoy fine dining experiences and my own amateur cooking, I look askance on a $60 small plate of foam. The Menu is a wicked, The-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes sendup of that kind of culinary silliness. Each of the courses of Chef Slowik’s meal (and each wine pairing) is its own very funny comment on food fads. The best is the “breadless bread”, which I guess is not a “deconstructed” dish, but an “unconstructed” one. The Tyler character gets funnier as he ignores the escalating horrors to laser in on the avant-garde flavor combinations.

The key to the story is that Margot is immune to pretension. Margot never buys into the extreme food scene, and she has street smarts, which equip her for an epic psychological showdown with Slowik.

Ana Taylor-Joy is one of my very favorite actors, endlessly watchable with as she projects her unique blend of intelligence and danger, I first discovered her in Thoroughbreds, and have enjoyed her in The Queen’s Gambit, Last Night in Soho and even the blah Amsterdam.

Ralph Fiennes is really cast perfectly as an ego monster with a telling insecurity or two. Hoult is a hoot, and Hong Chau, is a master of deadpan as Slowik’s henchwoman.

The Menu is only the fourth feature for veteran television director Mark Mylod (Game of Thrones, Succession). The screenplay – and it;s a damn good one – is by Seth Weiss and Will Tracy, who come out of The Onion. These guys, with Ana Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes, have made a pointedly acid and entertaining movie.

A BIGGER SPLASH: another exercise in sensuality

Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton in A BIGGER SPLASH
Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton in A BIGGER SPLASH

Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes) is the kind of guy who gives a bad name to joie de vivre.  The ultimate disrupter, his gift is to seize all the attention, change any social situation into a party and take everyone else out of their comfort zones.  In A Bigger Splash, he inflicts himself on his former rock star lover Marianne (Tilda Swinton), who is trying to enjoy a quiet romantic respite with her current lover Paul (Matthias Shoenaerts) on the secluded Italian island of Pantelleria. Enter Harry, exit solitude.

With only five minutes notice, Harry shows up, expecting to become a houseguest in Marianne and Paul’s  borrowed villa.  To make matters worse, Harry brings along his newly discovered daughter (Dakota Johnson), a highly sexual nymphet with eyes for Paul.  And, and the first day, he invites two of his other friends to join them.  Harry repeatedly tears off his clothes, starts everyone dancing (one of his dances is right up there in cinema history with the one in Napoleon Dynamite) and even turns a village cafe into an overflowing karaoke after-party.  Because Marianne is recuperating from vocal cord surgery, she can’t talk, which makes Harry’s social intrusions even more unbearable.

Harry’s antics are very entertaining, and we watch with apprehension for the other shoe to drop – when are the others going to explode in reaction?   Harry is also trying to insinuate himself back into Marianne’s bed, an intention apparent to the hunky/dreamy Paul, for whom still waters run deep.

This is Guadagnino’s first English language movie.  He had a recent US art house hit with I Am Love, (also starring Swinton).  I Am Love was notorious for its food porn, and there are tantalizing scenes in A Bigger Splash, too, with homemade fresh ricotta and a spectacular outdoor restaurant set amid hillside ruins.

Guadagnino’s greatest gift may be the sensuality of his films.  Whether it’s food, a place or a social situation, he makes the audience feel like we’re experiencing it right along with the character.  In A Bigger Splash, we start out as tourists in a hideout for the super rich, and then Guadagnino takes to us through a raucous comedy of manners to, finally, a suspense thriller.

Best Shakespeare Movies

After suggesting Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet for Valentine’s Day and commenting on the current release Coriolanus, I decided to make a list of Best Shakespeare Movies.  You may be surprised at who makes my list – and who doesn’t.

Filmmakers have advantages not available to Shakespeare.  They can depict realistic combat in the battle scenes.  They can add sex and nudity to romance.  And they can enhance  Macbeth‘s witches and visions with trippy special effects.

The actor and director Kenneth Branagh is the best modern interpreter of Shakespeare (and shows up on this list three times).   Branagh gives us a Henry V that is not just a Dead White Guy, but a young and impulsive king, fueled more by personal ambition and testosterone than national interest.  Here is Branagh’s charismatic St. Crispin’s Day speech from his Henry V.

Coriolanus: a hero unsuited

The actor Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.  The title character is a fierce and successful military leader upon whom is thrust political leadership that he has not aspired to and to which he is utterly ill-equipped.  It’s not going to end well, and that’s why they call it tragedy.

Coriolanus is devoted to the idea of Rome, which inspires his heroism in its defense.  But he despises most Romans and thinks it would be insincere to show them the least civility, which doesn’t bode well for his political career.  Fiennes does a good job playing Coriolanus, an oddball for whom “curmudgeon” doesn’t begin to tell the story.

Unfortunately, Coriolanus is propelled into the peacetime limelight by his ultra-ambitious mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and an able and well-meaning politician (Brian Cox).  Redgrave and Cox are splendid, and their performances are highlights of Coriolanus.  Coriolanus is well-acted, including by Jessica Chastain, the wonderful Irish actor James Nesbitt and even, surprisingly, Gerard Butler.

Fiennes the director has done well to set Shakespeare’s tale of ancient Rome into the present.  This story of war and politics comes alive in today’s world of cable television news, with its crawling captions and pundits, protest demonstrations and soldiers in Humvees.  By stripping away the swords and togas, Fiennes helps us recognize the ambition, personal stubbornness, political treachery and the fickleness of public opinion at the core of the story.  As Shakespeare probably wanted to, Fiennes is able to put his audience into realistic warfare.  Coriolanus was filmed in the Balkans and, indeed, Butler certainly looks like a Serbian warlord from the very recent past.

The problem with Coriolanus is that we admire Coriolanus’s high-mindedness less than we cringe at his social obtuseness.   But Fiennes (and Redgrave and Cox) have given us one of the best cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare.


Page Eight: top rate spy movie on TV

PBS is featuring the excellent British spy drama Page Eight on this week’s Masterpiece Contemporary.  It’s top rate.

How do the British do this so well?  First, they cut out all of the explosions and chase scenes.  Then they get a high-brow screenwriter – here it is David Hare (The Reader, The Hours, Damage) – to write a character driven whodunit with plenty of paranoid political intrigue.  Finally, they deliver a first rate cast:  Bill Nighy, Michael Gambon, Rachel Weisz, Judy Davis, Ralph Fiennes, Ewen Bremner (Spud in Trainspotting) and Felicity Jones (starring in this week’s Like Crazy).

Page Eight is definitely worth a Tivo.  Look for it.

DVD of the Week: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

In this 1979 miniseries version of the classic John le Carre spy novel, there is a Soviet mole in the highest echelon of British intelligence.  It could be anyone except George Smiley, whom the other top spies have pushed out to pasture.  Smiley, in one of Alec Guinness’ greatest performances, begins a deliberate hunt to unmask the double agent.  Guinness is joined by a superb cast that includes Ian Richardson, Patrick Stewart, Ian Bannen and Sian Phillips.  It’s 290 minutes of pressure-packed whodunit.

The Labor Day weekend is a great opportunity to watch the old master spy drilling down through the characters of his former peers to expose the mole – one of the best mysteries ever on film.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy has been remade into a much shorter theatrical version that will open in the US on November 18.  This new film version will also feature a top tier cast – Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Ralph Fiennes, Michael Fassbender, Ciaran Hinds, Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones and Stephen Rea.   The trailer is at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

Other recent DVD picks have been Poetry, Queen to Play, Kill the Irishman and The Music Never Stopped.