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
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