‘No Reservations’

Catherine Zeta-Jones proves she can do light comedy with flair, but this film would be pure mush without the beautifully nuanced performance by Abigail Breslin.

By: Bob Brown

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Aaron Eckhart and Catherine Zeta-Jones cook up some romance in No Reservations.


   This is light as a soufflé and about as filling. For English- speaking Americans who don’t like to read subtitles, this is director Scott Hicks’ answer to Sandra Nettelbeck’s German film Bella Martha (Mostly Martha, 2001). It’s in the foodie-romance genre, where girl meets boy through cuisine. The mixture is neither as combustible as, say, Like Water for Chocolate (1992), nor as bittersweet and winsome as this year’s Waitress. For that matter, the food itself is almost an extra compared with these, or even Disney’s animated Ratatouille. In short, you may walk away feeling partially satisfied, as though you’d had two courses of a three-course meal.
   Kate (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is the perfectionist chef at Bleeker 22, a posh downtown Manhattan eatery owned by Paula (Patricia Clarkson), who has required her to see a psychoanalyst (Bob Balaban). But Kate doesn’t recognize that her rigidity is turning fussy diners away. All she can talk about on the couch is food preparation. Why is she here at all? "I haven’t a clue," she tells him.
   Life, or rather death, intervenes when Kate’s sister is killed in a crash, leaving niece Zoe (Abigail Breslin) in Kate’s charge. She may be a master chef, but Kate is a lousy parental figure. She can’t even get Zoe to eat her five-star meals. The further insult is that Paula has hired a co-chef, Nick (Aaron Eckhart), to take over when one of the kitchen staff goes on maternity leave.
   Both Kate and Zoe are dealing with the unfairness of life, which is out of their hands. Zoe nurtures her grief behind a protective shell, pushing Kate away. Kate’s anger is intensified as a newcomer compromises her perfectly controlled kitchen.
   It’s bad enough that Nick is invading Kate’s domain without her permission. But he’s also livening up the place with sing-along opera, and even getting compliments from diners, who usually reserved their plaudits for Kate. You just know that the battle for the burners is going to wind up in the bedroom — eventually. First Nick has to soften up Kate with his deference, and open up Zoe with his pasta, a food too Italian for Kate’s French menus.
   If you’re a fan of the European original, you should note the differences, which make this a distinctly American movie. Nettelbeck’s chef Martha (Martina Gedeck) is typically Germanic in her attention to rules and procedure. When her domain is upset by the Mediterranean casualness of a newly hired Italian, Mario (Sergio Castellitto), it’s as if we’re watching in miniature the uneasy alliances that form the European Union.
   Unlike Zoe, whose long-gone father is barely mentioned, Martha’s niece Lina (8-year-old Maxime Foerste) pines for her wastrel Italian father, whom she has never met. Italy is the lodestone that pulls Martha and Mario together, through Lina and her fixation on all things Italian. The subtext seems to be, We Germans need to recover our youth and lighten up more, like our southern European cousins.
   In No Reservations, it’s not Nick who’s Italian, it’s his cuisine, which he learned backpacking through Europe. Free of such national references, the American film indulges in the sport we understand best, the war of the sexes. Nick tells Zoe that in the kitchen, he takes orders from Kate, then turns around and does what he wants behind her back.
   His affection for Pavarotti, and Italian opera in general is in odd contrast to his counterpart, Mario, the true Italian, who embraces all things Dean Martin. Remember "Volare"? One tries to forget. Therein lies another difference between the two characters: Mario is more like an Italian clown.
   The versatile Eckhart, on the other hand, who can play charming heavies, also shows he can play the purely charming card as well. In a role that’s hardly demanding, Zeta-Jones proves that she can do light comedy with some flair. But this film would be pure mush without the beautifully nuanced performance by Breslin, who lends credibility to a character who is key to the denouement.
   What one wants in foodie films, however, is the food as star in its own right. It’s missing in action here. There’s a lot of fussing about in a busy kitchen, and tasting of sauces (especially Kate’s secret recipe for a sauce she smothers on quail). One craves more of the lingering close-ups on gorgeously plated entrees and lusciously indulgent desserts. Where is food as sexual metaphor, front and center? The relationships hardly allow enough time to stop and glory in comestibles as objects for the camera in and of themselves. Those waitresses flit by with the orders much too quickly for my taste.
Rated PG for some sensuality and language.