Honors 1520/History 2920

"What's Cooking?"

Paper Topic: How does the film visualize America as a nation of multi-ethnics?

What's Cooking?United States, 2000
MPAA Classification: PG-13 (Profanity, brief nudity, sexual situations)

Cast: Joan Chen, Julianna Margulies, Mercedes Ruehl, Kyra Sedgwick, Alfre Woodard, Victor Rivers, Isidra Vega, Douglas Spain, Francois Chau, Will Yun Lee, Kristy Wu, Lainie Kazan, Maury Chaykin, Dennis Haysbert, Ann Weldon
Director: Gurinder Chadha
Producer: Jeffrey Taylor
Screenplay: Gurinder Chadha, Paul Mayeda Berges
Cinematography: Jong Lin
Music: Craig Pruess
U.S. Distributor: Lions Gate Films

In LA's Fairfax district, where ethnic groups abound, four households celebrate Thanksgiving amidst family tensions. In the Nguyen family, the children's acculturation and immigrant parents' fears collide. In the Avila family, Isabel's son has invited her estranged husband to their family dinner. Audrey and Ron Williams want to keep their own family's ruptures secret from Ron's visiting mother. In the Seelig household, Herb and Ruth are unwilling to discuss openly their grown daughter's living with her lover, Carla. Around each table, things come to a head. A gun, an affair, a boyfriend, and a pregnancy precipitate crises forcing each family to find its center

The film is entertaining as it mixes drama and comedy into an interesting recipe. To use other metaphors, the film is the American tossed salad or mixing bowl. We see four quite different families experiencing Thanksgiving day in seemingly different ways. But underneath, we see also the similarities of the joys, pains, and struggles as the various families deal with the reality hidden beneath the holiday veneer.

As the family members connect with and disconnect from each other and with members of the other families, the surface is pulled away, and we see what is really underneath the pleasantries and polite facades. This is a very accurate depiction of the sadness and humor that surround family holidays, and the film might be a good thing to watch just before or during such holidays. We see ourselves reflected in the mirror of the movie and can learn that holidays can be hilarious pains. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0197096/)

What's Cooking?, a product of the increasingly less prestigious Sundance Institute Writer's Lab, is the latest motion picture to explore the rather obvious links between cooking and life. Set in a middle class Los Angeles neighborhood, the film follows four families through the trials and tribulations of Thanksgiving dinner. Director Gurinder Chadha has aspirations of entering Robert Altman ensemble territory with this feature, but, just as the cinematic batter is beginning to reach the right consistency, she adds too many unnecessary ingredients - like overt melodrama and silly, surprise twists - and the mixture goes bad. With a Beach Boys tune playing on the soundtrack, the movie concludes on an improbable note.

Chadha's idea is to explore the similarities and differences of how four families celebrate that uniquely American holiday - Thanksgiving. Each has a different ethnic heritage: Vietnamese, Latino, African American, and Jewish. One of the director's goals is to contrast the cultural differences while highlighting the universality of some themes and issues, such as intolerance and strife within families. None of the dinners goes smoothly, with long-buried secrets coming to light and simmering conflicts exploding into the open. Unfortunately, the louder the arguments get, the more overwrought the acting becomes in the face of an increasingly melodramatic screenplay. By time the climax reaches the screen - a "message moment" that is so painfully preachy and over-the-top that it's offensive (even though I agree with the underlying politics) - What's Cooking? has been transformed from a low-key examination of family dynamics into an exercise in stridency and manipulation. It's a bad recipe. (http://www.reelviews.net/movies/w/whats_cooking.html)