@SteveR just mentioned this movie again which made me realize I had missed this thread on its inception. I saw the movie over the Thanksgiving Weekend, where my partner and I were the sole occupants of the theater. (An underrated experience. I recommend it.) We both LOVED the film, and it’s come up as a point of reference for us a few times since.
What I have yet to see, either here or on HO, is a discussion of (one of) the main, obvious points of the film: the skewering of ‘foodie’ culture. The language, the rarefied ingredients, the stories that seemingly MUST accompany these high priced meals. Clearly, the movie comes down fairly solidly on calling ‘bullshit’ on that sort of thing.
If you compare the increasingly non-hunger-abating courses of Hawthorne with the straightforward “it tastes good and satisfies my caloric need” of the final cheeseburger, then… what’s the film’s point? That cooking (as a service) should be about fulfilling nutritional and ‘taste’ requirements and stop pretending to be ‘more?’
Is ‘food as art’, (good Alinea or bad Bros ) inherently undesirable and elitist? Is it a moral crime to blow upwards of $1000 on a single meal when thousands in the same country go to bed hungry?
That seems like an awful big lift for something like this, and I don’t know that the film really is up to that task. But maybe the food was just the gateway symbol into the broader ‘people who serve’ vs. ‘people who take’ point, and I’m getting too hung up on the metaphor.
I know that I really liked the film, and if I had HBO Max I’d probably watch it again. I might even get the Blu Ray once that rolls around.