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WHAT’S
COOKING
5/10
USA
2001
director : Gurinder Chadha
script : Chadha, Paul Mayeda Berges
cinematography
: Jong Lin
editing : Janice Hampton
music : Craig Pruess
lead actors : Alfre Woodard, Mercedes Ruehl, Julianna Margulies, Joan
Chen
110 minutes
Four
middle-class LA families – one black, one Jewish, one Hispanic, one Vietnamese
– prepare their various Thanksgiving dinners. What’s Cooking is
as schematic and well-meaning as it sounds: impeccable intentions, so-so
results. The cast of well-chosen pros make the best of a script that nimbly
sketches in a wide range of characters over different ages and backgrounds.
And there are some unexpectedly sharp comic lines, most of them given
to Margulies and Kyra Sedgwick’s lesbian couple.
It’s
generally passably inoffensive stuff, as far as it goes, but we’ve seen
this family-drama stuff so many times before on the big and small screens,
and there isn’t anything sufficiently new or different this time. While
nobody’s expecting a Magnolia
or even a Short Cuts, that’s no excuse for the over-familiar situations
we get here, right up to the little-kid-gets-hold-of-a-gun finale (The
studio is keen that reviewers resist the temptation to reveal the ‘twist
ending’ – but it’s such a mild twist it barely deserves the name: many
viewers will be unaware that it’s a twist at all.)
“This
isn’t the time!” the characters keep snapping, clearly forgetting that,
in US films, whenever families gather for special holidays, it’s always
the time for arguments, intra-generational friction, the laying bare
of home truths while the turkey cools, uneaten. The ethnic angle undeniably
spices things up a little - it’s interesting to see the variations of
the turkey dish that reflect the different families’ tastes, and the lingering
culinary shots will set many stomachs rumbling. But, in the end, not quite
loud enough to drown the sound of social-problem boxes being neatly ticked
off, one by one by one.
27th
June, 2001
(seen at Showcase, Nottingham, 8-Jun-01)
by Neil
Young
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