¿Qué se está cociendo?

With Girlfight, this tops my best of 2000 list. Not that I have seen them all, and not that there's much competition. This was such a dreadful year in Hollywood I'm swearing off Oscar day. But this IS an amazing film (as is Girlfight). Let women direct more, I say, and let budgets be slashed in subatomic particles. Most importantly, let people who have stuff to say, say it. All the other ones should wait for inspiration.

One of the amazing things about this film is its pace. It is breathless, and you never quite stop laughing or gasping or having some variety of intense edge-of-your-seat emotional reaction. Which is amazing, because the plot is so complex, it could easily have gotten lost in chaos. Even as you laugh, the tension doesn't let up. The stories unfold rapidly and dramatically and with full comic timing, and you never quite stop marveling. We are not treated very often to this kind of inventive filmmaking.

If you've lived in LA for any significant length of time, you'll realize from the start that this film is not meant to be realistic. The MTA scenes at the beginning are so un-LA, so colorful and happy, you know this is going to be a grand fest of the imagination and the heart, not a tale of urban life. (For one, people on MTA buses tend to sit dejectedly, not to have a collective laugh&lovefest). Similarly, the ethnic angle is more life-as-we-would-like-it-to-be than life-as-is. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's so refreshing to see race on film without having to trudge through misery, pain, and blood, you want to weep with gratitude. What's Cooking? is full of big themes treated with similar lightness: broken families, same-sex relationships, tradition vs. progress, parenthood, urban violence, gender roles, politics... Even as it packs it all in, the film does it all seamlessly, treating it as the stuff of everyday's life it in fact is (funny how movies tend to deal with one issue at the time, and how we've grown to consider that a good thing).

But lightness is not glibness or superficiality. There's a big heart and a big sharp mind at the center of What's Cooking? and problems get taken seriously. Clearly, since this is the world as we'd like it to be, most things find some sort of satisfactory conclusion by the end. And that is more than all right, because we're tired to see gays and people of color go down, families drown in waters to thick to negotiate, and all the vast repertoire of disasters that make critics think a film "got it right." Nope. Not here. But the world as we'd like it to be can still be a POSSIBLE world, and this is ultimately the exhilarating nutshell of What's Cooking?: that joy is not beyond our reach, the pain can give way to healing, and that, hell, we can, maybe not perfectly but nonetheless, all get along.

Well done!

WHAT'S COOKING? (2000) ***1/2 Mercedes Ruehl, Joan Chen, Alfre Woodard, Kyra Sedgwick, Julianna Marguilies, Dennis Haysbert, Maury Chaykin, Lainie Kazan, Victor Rivers, Douglas Spain, A Martinez, Francois Chau, Will Yun Lee, Estelle Harris, Ralph Manza. Wonderful sleeper depicting four Los Angeles melting pot families all celebrating Thanksgiving, cross cutting between homes sharing the universal theme of family, love and ultimately acceptance of one another. Funny, emotional, intelligent and superbly acted with an equally impressive script by Gurinder Chadha (who directed) and Paul Mayeda Berges her real-life companion. Stand out performances especially by Ruehl, Chen & Woodard as strong-willed matriarchs and Sedgwick and Marguilies as one of the sexiest onscreen lesbian couples in some time. Kudos to the off-screen cooks who whip up some truly mouth-watering displays in uniquely different yet delicious dinners for the quartet broods.

"What's Cooking" is yet another film which shows a short period of time in the lives of multiple disconnected characters who have something in common. In "Magnolia" the common denominator was proximity. In "All the Rage" it was guns. In "The Five Senses" is was senses. Etc. Etc. Etc. In "What's Cooking" it's food....Thanksgiving Day dinner.

"What's Cooking" has superb casting, direction, script/screenplay, etc. However it has one huge problem which it shares with other films of this ilk: Too many characters and too little time with which to develop them sufficient to create that all important bond with the audience. The result is a herky-jerky story flow and a disconnected audience which is reduced to pure voyeurism. Too busy and too superficial.

Funny, charming, sad, and completely entertaining throughout.... a very talented ensemble cast...some surprises in the story. This is, I think, a holiday classic. I look forward to seeing it again and again.

Holidays are a time for families to come together. More often than not, these little "reunions" manage to bring out the worst in people and unpleasant episodes from the past get dredged up and brutally dissected for the thousandth time. Or your parents may take turns pushing your buttons (which of course they programmed in the first place) and endlessly aggravating you with a never-ending barrage of life questions. "When are you getting married?" "When are we getting grandchildren?" "What do you intend to do with your life?" Small wonder that the suicide rate increases exponentially around these times of joy.

Rather than limit herself to one family's deluge of dysfunctional dialogue at Thanksgiving, writer/director Gurminder Chadha, zooms in on a multi-family multicultural view of the holiday. We are introduced to the Jewish family with the lesbian daughter and her lover, the Hispanic family with the philandering husband and newly liberated wife, the cross-generational Vietnamese family's struggle with old traditions vs. new realities, and the successful yet fractured African American family. Happy holidays!

Unlike "The Big Night" where food is intended to inspire pure sensory decadence, or "Like Water for Chocolate" in which it takes on a mystical, magical quality, Chadha's uses food to illuminate the contrasts between the families in the piece. While turkey is served as the main course at every dinner table, it is prepared, cooked and presented very differently by each family. The roasted polenta, fajitas, spring rolls and homemade macaroni and cheese that supplant the side dishes typically associated with Thanksgiving - corn, cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes - further enhance the feeling (and reminded me that I had missed dinner). But movies do not live by food alone.

What sets this film apart from its contemporaries is not its parallel, intertwining plots, or the setting, but its execution. Any of the plots could easily provide enough fodder for a full-length movie, which makes their skillful amalgamation in 106 minutes that much more impressive. This is more remarkable when one takes into account that no one in the voluminous (there are dozens of speaking parts) and talented ensemble cast is there as window dressing - every character is solid and has a clearly defined purpose. Rarer still is the fact that the lion's share of screen time is devoted to the development of strong female characters, which might explain what drew Mercedes Ruehl, Julianna Marguelies and Joan Chen to the project. My praise has not yet ended.

The dialogue is realistic and well written, and the situations, though sometimes tongue-in-cheek, familiar and believable. The pacing is quick, slowing down to take a breather only when the audience needs it, but never leaves the viewer behind. The editing is tight and clean, rarely allowing any one scene to run too long. Finally, the cinematographer deserves congratulations for the exceptionally sumptuous food shots, I swear I could smell the turkey. In movies, as in life however, nothing is perfect.

The movie does lapse into stereotypes in several instances, for example, could anyone be as truly annoying and clueless as the character of Aunt Bea (played to wonderful excess by Estelle Harris)? I hope not. The film also goes to the sentimentality well a little too often and the ending, while clever, is contrived. While noticeable, these flaws are merely mildly distracting, and do not overwhelm the film.

As the saying goes, I laughed, I cried, I cringed, it was an experience. * Make reservations to catch this delectable dish as soon as it's served up at your local theater.

*I didn't actually cry, I just got a little something in my eye.