'No Reservations' short on spice

The film gets the ebb and flow of a real-life professional kitchen right. It's the romantic relationships that don't work.

By Laura Reiley, Times food critic
Published July 26, 2007

In the movies, this is the year of food as metaphor.

In Waitress, the life lessons were about pie, baked out of equal parts hope and frustration in small-town America. In Ratatouille, haute-cuisine Paris was the source of universal truths. For No Reservations, all wisdom about life's meaning emanates from the walk-in refrigerator at 22 Bleecker Street in Manhattan.

And what do we learn about life amongst the stacks of carrots and heaps of quail? Conveniently, executive chef Kate Armstrong Catherine Zeta-Jones sums it all up: "I wish there were a recipe for life." To which her therapist (Bob Balaban) sagely responds that the best recipes in life are the ones you create yourself - typical of this ham-fisted romantic drama to thunk the message on the plate before us.

Kate is a buttoned-up classical French chef. We meet her as she methodically dons her chef whites as if preparing for battle. Food is deadly serious; it is her life - we see the well-oiled machine of her kitchen churning through a busy night, without the least touch of levity. Cue the life-changing event.

There are two, actually, that happen nearly concurrently. Her niece Zoe (Abigail Breslin, looking every bit as disheveled as in Little Miss Sunshine, only somehow tinier and more vulnerable) comes to live with her, and the restaurant owner (an underused Patricia Clarkson) hires hunky Nick Palmer (Aaron Eckhart) to be Kate's temporary sous chef.

The "this kitchen ain't big enough for the both of us" setup is telegraphed like a frying pan to the noggin. Kate cooks French while Nick cooks, gulp, Italian. Her resume reflects years of formal training; he bummed around Italy and picked stuff up. Her uniform is textbook; he wears funny chef pants that look like pajamas.

We are meant to see all this contrast as the source of sexual tension. Nick cooks for her; Kate refuses to nibble. Instead, he gets shell-shocked Zoe to eat (it's a bowl of spaghetti, and I ask you what kind of coup is it to get a kid to eat spaghetti?), thawing Kate's heart a bit in the process.

Therein lies the problem: Kate's character is unlikable in extremis. Movie-cliche scenes of Kate and Zoe pillow-fighting or mugging in a photo booth fail to convince us she's found her maternal instinct. Director Scott Hicks (Shine)has taken a page from teenybopper films, substituting music-video swells for dialogue in all the "getting to know each other" scenes among the three main characters.

The movie gets the kitchen patter and flow right - Kate and Nick even exhibit some fairly respectable knife skills (Zeta-Jones and Eckhart studied for a couple of weeks with celebrity chef Michael White). There are a couple goofs: Nick double dips with his tasting spoon; Kate's famous classical saffron sauce has Kaffir lime leaf in it (huh?). Still, it's the lukewarm interplay between the characters that leaves this film unfulfilling: This kitchen could stand a little more heat.

Laura Reiley can be reached at (727) 892-2293 or lreiley@sptimes.com.

Review
Grade: B-
Director: Scott Hicks
Cast: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Aaron Eckhart, Abigail Breslin, Patricia Clarkson and Bob Balaban
Screenplay: Carol Fuchs, Sandra Nettelbeck (Nettelbeck wrote and directed the original German version, Mostly Martha, released in 2002.)
Rating: PG; some sensuality and language
Running time: 105 min.

[Last modified July 24, 2007, 15:15:11]