On Ratatouille
♠
On a recent Friday evening, I waited outside the movie theater with two tickets for Ratatouille in my hand. I was impatient for my friend to arrive, because I find that it is exclusively at those moments when you are most vulnerable that you run into an old acquaintance from college. You may have just missed a catch during a touch football game at the park, foregone buying a home-cooked meal for a box of mac n’ cheese at the store, or better yet, paid hard-earned money on a glorious evening in June to watch a cartoon. And suddenly the years that have passed between college and adulthood, all you have said and done and changed about yourself, evaporate, reducing the sum of your life to a single, horrible point in time: You, the tickets, and a triumphant smirk dawning across your acquaintance’s face.
But instead of this acquaintance, an anonymous family of four strolled past me. A boy, roughly age 10, formed his fingers into a gun, pointed it at a poster of Ratatouille, and said, “I hate Ratatouille!”
From watching Ratatouille and witnessing the restless and rebellious reactions of the children in the theater (heavily outnumbered by the adults), it is clear that this animated confection did not tickle the imagination of children in the way previous Pixar movies have done. While there are several stunning action sequences, it is understandable that a child would prefer the more fantastical elements in Monsters Inc. and The Incredibles to a movie that teaches you how to cut leeks, reminds you to keep your kitchen station clean, and emphasizes the importance of proper seasoning. In many ways, the movie reminded me of a well-intentioned uncle who, to the delight of your parents, has given you a copy of The Little Prince for your birthday, only for you to quickly drop it in favor of the latest iteration of Optimus Prime.
However, Ratatouille did appeal to many adults, particularly critics of movies and food. But who was this movie made for? Adults or children? The question is relevant for a movie that has been touted as a bildungsroman on the order of A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, praised for its championing of individual excellence in a society too content with the mediocre, and above all, hailed for expressing the simple joy that good food brings us. It is a joy that seems to be recognized more and more with each passing day in America, as if the country, like a man who as a child refused to eat his vegetables, is awakening to an idea older cultures the world over have known for some time.
Perhaps it is fitting then that the group that should succeed in delivering this discovery to a larger audience is a group whose traditional bread and butter was entertaining kids. However, it does not clear up the fact that Ratatouille attempts to resonate with adults—and only adults—on certain levels, only to excuse itself as merely a fun movie for children on others. Ratatouille then, while satisfying, leaves a strange aftertaste in the mouth, a muddled sensation of truths mixed with half-truths, like homegrown basil paired with factory-made mozzarella.
If Ratatouille gets food and the cooking of food “right,” as restaurant critics and blogs by famous chefs have affirmed, it is not the first movie to do so. A proper homage to cooking and food can be found in movies like Tampopo, a Japanese comedy in which an eclectic and loosely connected cast of characters—which includes gangsters, a man searching for the perfect ramen recipe, and a pair of lovers who do some interesting things with crustaceans and eggs—is obsessed with food. (The characters’ obsession with food matches the country’s. Regular network television can often seem more like a Food Network that does the news every once in a while.) But closer in theme and spirit to Ratatouille, and a more appropriate foil to examine it by, is The Big Night, a movie that unfortunately was released in 1996 instead of 2007, a year in which it surely would have flourished commercially.
The Big Night is the story of Primo and Secondo, two brothers from
As the first scene opens, we see a middle-aged husband and wife seated in Primo’s and Secondo’s otherwise empty restaurant. They are starving and clamoring for their food. Meanwhile, Primo is in the kitchen putting the last perfectionist touch on a seafood risotto, heedless of the stomachs grumbling beyond the kitchen doors and Secondo’s pleas to get moving. The couple is finally served. The woman cannot find any bits of seafood in her risotto, not a scallop, not a shrimp, complains to Secondo, and orders some spaghetti and meatballs to fill out her meal. Primo, who has been waiting expectantly in the kitchen for a review, is outraged at this request. He suggests wryly that perhaps the lady would like a side of mashed potatoes to go with her rice and her pasta. To which Secondo replies, “Make-a the pasta, make-a the pasta, make-a the pasta!”
Secondo is no philistine when it comes to cuisine, but he is a realist. The restaurant is failing. He knows the brothers must do something different if they are to succeed in
Pascal offers to invite Louis Prima, the famous singer whom he knows personally, to the restaurant as a way of generating some much-needed buzz. And so, with the last of their money, the brothers begin preparing for The Big Night.
They invite all their friends, including the neighborhood priest, the barber, Pascal, both of Secondo’s girlfriends (for some tension), and Primo’s crush, the girl from the flower shop. What follows, of course, is a montage: they make-a their own pasta, they chop-a the garlic, and they create their hometown specialty, a timpano, a many-layered thing that is apparently delicious. The guests arrive, drink copious amounts of wine, play records, and dance. (This is one of those happily inebriated scenes that only movies can pull off; like Dazed and Confused, it inspires a completely innocent desire to get wasted.) Louis Prima seems to be running late, so the brothers decide to begin serving dinner. The first course comes out, and all of a sudden, the raucous party goes silent: everyone eats. The moment is mouthwatering, but also reverential. Then just as quickly the party starts up again, course after course is rolled out of the kitchen doors, and the guests hail the food by lifting their napkins and twirling them about their heads like lassos.
Throughout the montage and the dinner scenes, there are several moments that illuminate the details of a chef’s life and speak to the joy of food. We see the brothers hauling a huge, fresh fish from the car, smelling produce, moving around the kitchen’s beautiful range, and constantly tasting the food with their fingers. At one point, Primo brings the girl from the flower shop into the kitchen and prepares her a sauce. As he cooks, he describes the best Bolognese sauce he’s ever had, at a small restaurant tucked away in a town in
The dinner is a smashing success. Except for one thing (and I don’t believe I’m giving anything away here): Louis Prima doesn’t show. The realization casts a pall over the night’s festivities and sparks a confrontation between the two brothers that has been threatening to boil over the entire movie. The crux of that confrontation, and the dilemma the movie poses, can be found in a conversation between the two brothers in which Secondo is trying to convince Primo that The Big Night with Louis Prima is their last chance for success. Primo looks disturbed and Secondo asks, “What’s the matter with you, are you sick?”
Primo: People should come just for the food.
Secondo: I know. Primo, I need your help here, okay? Louis Prima is coming! He’s not just some guy, he’s famous!
Primo: Famous? Is he good?
Secondo: He’s great.
Primo: People should come just for the food.
Secondo: I know that.
Primo: People should come just for the food!
Secondo: I know that, I know. But they don’t.
For all its somber themes, The Big Night is a comedy. And so at the end, we have a reconciliation. I won’t give it away, but only say that it involves a few fresh eggs, salt and pepper, and some good bread. For food is not only eaten for pleasure—it is also eaten for solace.
Ratatouille is a cartoon, and as such perhaps we have to forgive it for its more eupeptic ending. But as I have said, the movie strives to be something more than a movie for kids, and its most poignant moment, which lays bare the heart of the movie, is for adult minds only. (And here, I will give something away if you haven’t seen it yet.) Remy’s toughest test comes when he faces the uber-critic, Anton Ego. He prepares, of course, a ratatouille, to the surprise of his allies in the kitchen. It is “peasant food,” one chef says. But Remy is certain, a French Laundry-inspired ratatouille is concocted, and Anton Ego is served. Ego whips out his pen, but before he can scribble a single note, the first bite transports him to a moment in his childhood when his mother made him a ratatouille.
It is a superb scene. It echoes what many great chefs have said in interviews and books, that great food is inspired by the food that comes from home. It also evokes the peculiar relationship food has to memory. It is why Proust is obsessed with a madeleine, a mere cookie; or why Primo’s Bolognese sauce is more than a Bolognese sauce; or why the fictional detective Nero Wolfe spends a considerable part of his life attempting to re-create one sausage he ate in Montenegro as a young man. Food, at its very best, can help us regain lost time.
But the Remy’s final triumph, the way he displays his intimate knowledge of food, is surely something that only an adult can understand. What child is capable of that type of reflection and susceptible to its charms? The movie wouldn’t have to answer this question if it was able to push off from that moment and remain in the realm of adulthood. But what we get instead is a child’s version of absolute victory: Remy has the approval of the highest critic in the land, the line outside his new bistro wraps around the block, and to boot, the members of his rat family are as happy as clams.
Are we to view Ratatouille as a child’s movie that has some moments of true pathos for all and leave it at that? Or are we to view it as a sometimes great film about food that in the end is constrained by a desire to make nice? I think most would choose the former. However, if we are to talk about a chef’s life, and in a wider sense the life of passion in the face of harsh realities, let us not forget the Primos of this world. Pixar doesn’t need to make a movie of it—the kids will surely discover it on their own.
—RS