Chef dir. by Jon Favreau (review)

Here’s the setup: Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) is a talented, star chef, working in Los Angeles at a posh and profitable restaurant. But he’s in a spiritual and creative rut. His restaurant’s repressive, business-minded owner (Dustin Hoffman) prevents him from cooking the innovative and exotic foods that inspire him, and over time, Chef Casper has gradually lost control over his own kitchen and his creative life. When an important food critic (Oliver Platt) publishes a scathing and insulting review of Casper’s food, suggesting that the chef has traded his talent and passion for middle-class mediocrity, an enraged Casper challenges the critic to return to the restaurant for a second go. But Casper’s temper prevents him from getting the chance to cook the critic a better meal: he fights with the inflexible restaurant owner, is fired, and then storms into the restaurant to scream at the critic—a public ragefest that ends up on the Internet, making Casper both a laughing-stock and a professional pariah.

In need of a job, Casper agrees to accompany his ex-wife (Sofia Vergara) and son (Emjay Anthony) on a trip to Miami, where, upon sampling the comforting flavors of a Cuban sandwich, the chef realizes that his ex-wife’s suggestion that he open a food truck might be a pretty good idea. He gets his hands on an old truck, and with some help from his former line cook, Martin (John Leguizamo), spruces it up. Before you know it, Casper has his groove back: Cooking simple but delicious Cuban food (medianoche sandwiches, fried yucca), he is brought back to life creatively and is able to reconnect with his friends and family. With his son and line cook in tow, he decides to drive his truck back to L.A., stopping in different cities along the way, adding local flavors and specialties to his menu: beignets in New Orleans, barbecue in Austin. Everything ends happily when, back in L.A., his successful food truck captures the attention of the same food critic who initially sank his career. This time, however, the critic is so smitten by Casper’s delicious and ethnically enhanced menu, that he offers to back Casper in a new restaurant, where the chef will have full creative control.

Chef is a cannily made, mostly delightful concoction, offering many satisfying pleasures. Writer-director Favreau, best known for action blockbusters such as Iron Man 1 and 2, abandons the frenetic violence of such films for the thoughtful character development, leisurely pace, and sensuous camerawork that characterize Chef. Providing lavish close-ups of dishes that are at once colorful, sculptural compositions and also mouth-watering, tantalizing meals, he uses the camera to seduce viewers into experiencing the eros of food. We can see and feel the artistry and passion that Casper pours into his cooking, and when at the midpoint of the film, the chef begins to sing a Caribbeanized version of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” while driving his food truck, we understand that he has finally recuperated his inspiration and is once again living life, fully.

Chef can thus also be seen as the story of the redemption of a white man. In the current economic climate, when many people have had to deal with the unpleasant realities of joblessness and downward mobility, Chef offers an uplifting tale that suggests that when your life falls apart, redemptive and ultimately fulfilling things will happen. Degraded professional possibilities are really opportunities for entrepreneurial chutzpah and spiritual rejuvenation. While that may be a reassuring fable many want to hear right now, I couldn’t help but notice how, throughout the film, the restoration of Chef Casper is also crucially enabled by his ability to find regenerative artistic resources in the commodification of Latino culture, even as this heterophagy does nothing to lift Latinos out of the secondariness to which they are relegated for most of the film.

One key scene in this regard occurs when Casper acquires a dilapidated and filthy...