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FILM REVIEW
JUSTIN CHANG
Burnt
DIRECTOR: John Wells
STARRING: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller
During the worst of his many
plate-smashing tantrums,
Adam Jones (Bradley
Cooper), self-styled bad
boy of the London culinary
world, scolds his fellow chefs for not
meeting his brutally exacting standards:
“If it’s not perfect, you throw it away!”
Applying that logic, we would have to
dispense entirely with “Burnt,” a moodyfoodie
therapy session that follows an
increasingly tidy narrative recipe as it
sets this one-man kitchen nightmare on a
long road to redemption. Although John
Wells’ dramedy is energized by its mouthwatering
montages and an unsurprisingly
fierce turn from Cooper, Steven Knight’s
script pours on the acid but holds the
depth, forcing its fine supporting actors
(including Sienna Miller and Daniel
Bruhl) to function less as an ensemble
than as a motley sort of intervention
group. Unlikely to capitalize on its oncerumored
awards prospects, the Weinstein
Co.’s Oct. 30 release might still stir up a
favorable arthouse and VOD response.
Working from a story by Michael
Kalesniko (“Iron Sky”), Knight brings a
brisk professionalism to his latest movie
about a man’s quest for three Michelin
stars (following last year’s “The Hundred-
Foot Journey”). Still, there’s something
a bit too slick and breezy about the way
we’re introduced to Adam, an American
expat who became one of the world’s
greatest chefs by toiling in one of Paris’
greatest kitchens, and is now one of
cinema’s greatest a-holes, seeking to
redeem himself and his career after
the skirt-chasing, substance-abusing
meltdown that led to the restaurant’s
permanent closure. Years later, Adam has
dried out and done his penance in a New
Orleans oyster bar, though he still acts
like a guy who doesn’t give a shuck as he
swaggers into London, determined to take
the city’s restaurant scene by storm.
But first, he’ll need the help of his
trusty old maitre d’, Tony (Bruhl), who
reluctantly hands over his present finedining
establishment to Adam, though
their rocky past still looms over them.
As he builds up his kitchen dream team,
Adam keeps running into old friends
and enemies who make annoyingly
cryptic references to “what happened in
Paris” without ever spelling out exactly
what happened in Paris. The returning
old-timers include Michel (Omar Sy), a
sous chef who’s willing to let bygones
be bygones if he can get in on Adam’s
new venture, and Italian ex-con Max
(Riccardo Scamarcio), whose ill-tempered
perfectionism rivals the boss’s own.
Adam taps a few new recruits as well,
including Helene (Miller), a strong-willed
chef de partie who gets a Gordon Ramsayworthy
tirade from Adam on the night of
the restaurant’s not-so-grand reopening.
STIRRED,
NOT SHAKEN
Bradley Cooper
and Sienna
Miller get cookin’
in “Burnt.”
CREDITS: A Weinstein
Co• release and
presentation of a
Shiny Penny Prods./3
Arts Entertainment/
Battle Mountain Films
production. PRODUCED
BY Stacey Sher, Erwin
Stoff, John Wells.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS,
Bob Weinstein, Harvey
Weinstein, Michael
Shamberg, Kris Thykier,
David Glasser, Claire
Rudnick Polstein, Dylan
Sellers, Negeen Yazdi.
CO-PRODUCER, Caroline
Hewitt.
DIRECTED BY John
Wells. SCREENPLAY,
Steven Knight; STORY,
Michael Kalesniko.
CAMERA (TECHNICOLOR,
WIDESCREEN), Adriano
Goldman; EDITOR,
Nick Moore; MUSIC,
Rob Simonsen; MUSIC
SUPERVISORS, Dana
Sano; PRODUCTION
DESIGNER, David
Gropman; SUPERVISING
ART DIRECTORS, Karen
Gropman, John Frankish.
REVIEWED AT Rodeo
screening room, Beverly
Hills, Oct. 15, 2015. MPAA
RATING: R. RUNNING TIME:
100 MIN.
CAST: Bradley Cooper,
Sienna Miller, Omar Sy,
Daniel Bruhl, Riccardo
Scamarcio, Sam Keeley,
Alicia Vikander, Matthew
Rhys, Uma Thurman,
Emma Thompson, Lily
James, Sarah Greene
Naturally, it’s only a matter of time before
they kiss and make up, and soon their
colleagues are placing bets on how long
it will take Adam to bed his one and
only female hire. If that quasi-romantic
thread and the tough-customer kitchen
dynamics seem to nod in the direction
of “Ratatouille” — there’s even an allpowerful
restaurant critic (Uma Thurman
in a two-scene cameo) — the comparisons
end there. Far from being a glorious
portrait of the artist as a young cook,
“Burnt” devolves into an angst-ridden
melodrama of relapse and recovery,
where no amount of gastronomical
window dressing can disguise the familiar
spectacle of one very gifted man behaving
very badly.
Not that there’s anything wrong with
gastronomical window dressing, and
what we see here is certainly choice: a
casual breakfast of tea-smoked mackerel
and bouillabaisse, a child’s birthday
cake dappled with pink rosettes, an
unidentifiable green amuse-bouche that
has “too much tarragon” and looks no
less slurpable for it. Wells captures the
culinary milieu as well as its underlying
energy: The dishes are shot in tantalizing
closeups by d.p. Adriano Goldman and
spliced into fluid, delectable sequences
by editor Nick Moore, whose cutting
mimics the swift, furious movements of
an expertly wielded blade.
Knight’s script, too, supplies sharp,
glancing insights into this ultracompetitive
environment and the killer
instinct it takes to succeed, even turning
the Michelin quest into a sort of heist
caper that continually places Adam
and his team (which he models on the
warriors from “Seven Samurai”) on high
alert. Unfortunately, “Burnt” never rises
to the level of its characters’ ambition,
and with the exception of one smart,
unpredictable twist, the story increasingly
bogs down in perfunctory subplots,
including a brief run-in with a mysterious
ex-lover (a lovely, fleeting Alicia Vikander)
and the thugs who routinely turn up to
shake Adam down for drug money.
All the supporting players, in the end,
are forced to serve a basically therapeutic
purpose, trying to show Adam that his
extreme perfectionism is destroying
his capacity for functional human
relationships — which makes even the
never-unwelcome Emma Thompson
seem pretty redundant in the role of an
actual therapist. Cooper combines a deft
physicality in the kitchen with a tightly
wound verbal dexterity: He knows exactly
how to sell an acerbic one-liner like
“Apologize to the turbot, because it died
in vain,” but also a dreamy sentiment like
“I want to make food that makes people
stop eating.” You believe him, and much of
the frantic activity swirling around him,
without ever quite believing the movie
that Wells and Knight have cooked up.
108 Final Cut