This Is All I Wanted To Bring Home With Me
by ALEX CARNEVALE
Our cinematic present is a rambling brush of signs thick with (or entirely lacking) the proper signifiers. Nothing is subtle, nothing is The Manchurian Candidate, and I'm not referring to the piece of shit remake that consigned Denzel Washington to a future as a subway traffic controller.
There is, however, a film I keep returning to again and again. It is a kind of Rosetta Stone of filmmaking. It would be like making Citizen Kane if you were handed the script of Armageddon. It is an achievement nonpareil.
That film is Simply Irresistible, the irrepressible story of a girl who couldn't cook, but then figured out how. It stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, a young actress currently going through a tough time as she becames too unattractive for her previous roles, and yet not grave enough for anything more serious than The Grudge. She should consider radical plastic surgery to become Christian Bale, because he is in every movie in theaters and is a worse actor than she is in every conceivable way.
Gellar plays Amanda, the inheritor of a small New York restaurant, a failing New York restaurant but a charming New York restaurant. Her mother was a terrific cook, a better than terrific cook, but she is not. This is a premise more inherent to our time than the time the film was released: the golden 1996-1997 period that I pray each day I will be transported back to.
Amanda's life is a sad one. She doesn't even have a phallus to roll around in her, she most likely doesn't even know what a vibrator is. Her best friend is a young African-American sous chef who is notable for causing the decline of the American banking system by borrowing more than he could afford.
Amanda is not in an enviable place. She is a sad story, and she doesn't even have Obama to complain to. Perhaps he could he employ her as part of his plan to make us like socialist Europe and ruin what was great about this country. But it's 1996, and he's selling drugs to community members in Chicago, and Amanda is in a tough spot.
Beyond mere economic troubles, Amanda's character has more problems. Although she has more personality than Jenna Fischer, she's not quite as successful with men who have jobs. Frequently she comes on too strong, talks too much, and frightens away potential suitors.
Then she meets Tom (Sean Patrick Flanery). He's the uber-successful head of a multimillion company, back when there was such a thing. The fate of Tom's entire department store hinges on the opening of a spectacular new restaurant on the top floor of the building, and despite impressive management techniques and really cute outfits, he's not much of a people motivator. It is really a sad thing that Jude Law was not available for this role. Remake?
Tom is taken when we meet him, integrated (via Bluetooth) with a coldblooded woman (Amanda Peet). (This tribute to Saving Silverman is all the more impressive because it occurred before Silverman was even conceived by Lord Satan as an idea for a motion picture.) One night Tom and Amanda find the little restaurant that Amanda works at, and they eat.
Here the adventure takes a fortunate turn, since there is not much that is devoted to food on film. After all, you can't taste it. Sure Nora Ephron might occasionally ruin the life story of Julia Child, but it's altogether more likely that writers and directors doesn't understand the meaning of food.
Not everyone does: just really fat people, and the impoverished third world.
Through the magic of lobster or poverty, Amanda's food comes alive that night. It fills every sense, it consummates love and every other emotion in its texture, smell, and composition. It makes people love her and each other more.
Tom is instantly in love with this vivacious woman, who not only cooks like he's never eaten before, but also in view of the evidence seems capable of bearing his children. And although Tom is your typically strong, oversexed male, or perhaps because he is, he runs from that love.
We must run from love, we think. We don't deserve it, so it must find us in the most roundabout way possible. And for men that fact is never more clear than when a woman is making herself available...and her soup has you floating, literally, on the ceiling.
Yes this is magic food. Amanda is the progeny of a magic lobster, a shellfish Cupid if you will. He believes that she can be in love just as much as she does. In the film's primary subplot, Patricia Clarkson gets her meaty hands all over a fellow executive because he's so smitten with Amanda's macaroons. It's just like how Moses had magic matzoh, but more gentile and less Biblical.
Here comes opening night for Tom's restaurant. He's somehow bullied into taking on Amanda as the chef, and he gets a crisis of confidence. Bucking conventional wisdom in these matters, advised by her bankrupt African-American sidekick, she shows up at Tom's department stores in a super-cute jacket, and makes polite conversation. He is stricken. She is coming on too strong!
On the night of the event, Amanda faces a chef determined to undermine her. She struggles to control her kitchen, can't just be confident in her cooking. You'd think the magic lobster who gave her culinary talent would alert her to his existence, but it's up to her to find her own way. More than nationalist allegory, this is actually the Biblical moment for Amanda, at least through the first course. This is creation, pure and simple.
Tom is so nervous about putting his fate in the one he cares for that he can't eat or watch. When he finally looks, everyone's sobbing into their dinner plates. One of Amanda's vampire-killing tears made its way into the soup, and the collected diners are overcome with the meaning of everything, the fragility of existence. How sad everything looks in this light.
By the time dessert comes around, she has won them over and Tom in the process. He can't imagine not wanting her, the feeling of her hair on his chest, her rising smell, the pitter patter of her feet in the kitchen. Man is a corruptible organism; woman is more pure, prone to the accelaration and decelaration, carving beauty without knowing it.
What in film has ever touched on all these things, and so truly?
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.
"Love Doesn't Last Too Long" — The Weepies (mp3)
"Not Your Year" — The Weepies (mp3)
"Gotta Have You" — The Weepies (mp3)
