Corduroy Orange

I went to see Ratatouille this weekend with somewhat modest expectations for the film–after all, it’s a culinary movie about an animated rat, written and animated for young children and, by association, their parents.

Hollywood can’t even get the kitchen right when they’re dealing with live actors. Instead, they telegraph that someone is supposed to be a chef by having them prepare grilled jarlsberg sandwiches that look like they spent too long in the pan at far too high a temperature (The Devil Wears Prada), put them in bright, white, absolutely stain-free jackets in a slow-paced environment and show little or no actual food preparation (Spanglish), or exxxagerate all of the gross-out stories anyone has ever told about the culinary workplace (Waiting). How much better could they do with a cartoon rodent?

My expectations were lowered as I sat through preview after preview for movies that are bound to be absolute garbage (Daddy Day Camp; a live-action version of Underdog; and Jerry Seinfeld as a bee in Bee Movie). I leaned over and said to my wife, “What do you say we sneak out of this theater and hop over to Transformers before the movie starts?”

I’m glad she shushed me and told me to wait. Ratatouille wound up being not only an entertaining film, but also the most faithful representation of the rigors of the kitchen environment that I can remember. the story, to recap for anyone who has somehow missed out on Disney’s publicity blitz, involves a garbage boy named Linguini who teams up with a rat named Remy who happens to be a culinary genius. Remy hides under Linguini’s chef’s toque and steers him to culinary acclaim by using locks of Linguini’s hair like horse reins. Far-fetched to say the least, but there’s a certain amount of willing suspension of disbelief that accompanies an animated feature. Nonetheless, there were many details that made the film come across true to the kitchen.

The restaurant’s top chef is a dominant egomaniac who thinks nothing of screaming, yelling, berating, and belittling anyone who works under or around him. Many of today’s best chefs have abandoned this practice, but it’s still somewhat common for the chief to deal with the enormous pressure he faces to get everything right by lashing out verbally (if not physically) at everyone else in the establishment.
When Linguini is first trained on the line, it is by Colette, the lone female cook in the kitchen—a fact she points out to the lad by explaining how the structure of the kitchen is stacked against women, and the only way she has managed to survive is by being tougher than anyone else in the room.

How true! Women make too few appearances in the professional kitchen despite the fact that they have for years dominated the home kitchen. Why? Because the men who dominate the gastronomic realm tend to bully, abuse, and harass them. The women who make it tend to have two features in common: extraordinarily thick skin and a willingness to fight back. It’s telling that the most famous female chef ever, Julia Child, never worked in a restaurant kitchen, save perhaps, for guest appearances after she had already obtained her fame.

Lastly, Colette gives a true to life speech about the planning, speed, and precision that are required to successfully complete all tasks required at the same time. Listening to her words, I felt like I was speaking them. They were very similar to speeches I have given at various times to the uninitiated.

The movie had one main weakness in the apparent dimwittedness of its human protagonist. Despite Linguini having repeatedly and continuously executed a dish under the puppeteering direction of Remy, the human apparently failed to pay any attention to what his hands were doing and found himself clueless when not being controlled. Likewise, the rest of the kitchen was similarly clueless, having apparently not paid any attention nor gotten any sort of description of the preparation of the “Linguini Special.”

Still, this is a fairly minor flaw in consideration of everything that it got right—chief among the list, entertainment value. I wholeheartedly recommend that you see this film.
Rating: 3 1/2 Oranges.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Restaurant Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.