"WHAT'S COOKING?"
by Kevin Thomas
"What's Cooking?" is a sure-fire winner, an endlessly inventive serious comedy that zeroes in on four Los Angeles families - the Avilas, the Nguyens, the Seeligs, and the Williamses - as they prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving.
Co-writer and director Gurinder Chada, a Kenya-born Englishwoman of Indian descent, whose first film was the delightful "Bhaji on the Beach," about a busload of Indian women on an outing to Blackpool, has precisely the right perspective and bemused sensibility to capture our city's famous multicultural diversity.
For so brisk and entertaining a film, sharp in its observations but light in its touch, "Cooking" has unexpected substance and is a formidable accomplishment in that it brings dimension to its nearly 40 principal characters. Chadha and co-writer Paul Mayeda Burges accomplish this by an inspired structure coupled with some of the smartest dialogue heard in an American film this year.
By cutting back and forth between the four families Chadha establishes a buoyant, lively rhythmic pacing while constantly furthering the plot. With the preparation of the Thanksgiving meal given four distinct and clearly delicious approaches, "What's Cooking?" has got to be the most savory movie since not only "Like Water for Chocolate" (1992) but also 1987's "Babette's Feast."
Each time Chadha returns to a family, she and Berges have in motion a developing situation, each loaded with unpredictable elements, that provoke responses from their characters that enable us to see them in an evolving light. The film seesaws between tradition and change with its people learning as they go what's important to hold onto and let go of. As a result, "What's Cooking?" captures the spirit of family life in contemporary Los Angeles to a degree unexpected in a mainstream movie.
Every element of the film gleams, but its script is exceptional, its wit bubbling with seeming spontaneity from what is actually a rock-solid foundation. In the finest Hollywood tradition, it touches on serious issues and genuine emotion with an unfailing, infectious sense of humor.
All four families live in the central city along a pleasant, leafy stretch of Genesee Avenue, most likely not far from Olympic Boulevard. All live in well-maintained older homes, some more elaborate and sophisticated in decor than others, but all warm and inviting. The Williamses, who are African American, live in a large, old Spanish-style house with a sleek contemporary interior. Alfre Woodard's Audrey, a divorce lawyer, prepares her nouvelle cuisine turkey amid mounting tension. Her husband Ronald (Dennis Haysbert) has an all-consuming job as a top aide to a controversial conservative governor.
That leaves her to cope with her visiting mother-in-law Grace (Ann Weldon), an unthinking and critical traditional matriarch who worships her son but, with comical obtuseness, finds fault with the way Audrey does everything. Both Audrey and Ronald are on the edge over their son Michael (Eric K. George) for an undisclosed reason and make excuses to Grace for his assumed absence from the table. The Williamses' gathering will pack plenty of surprises, some of them hilarious, others stinging.
There's also tension at the Nguyens, new to the neighborhood. Joan Chen's Trinh and her husband Duc (Francois Chau), proprietor of a video rental store, are aghast at discovering an unopened condom in a coat belonging to their unhappy daughter (Kristy Wu), refusing to buy her explanation that they're handed out at school. They should be more concerned with their headed-for-trouble son (Jimmy Pham), whom their daughter is trying to protect. The Nguyens are clinging to their Vietnamese traditions so tightly they haven't a clue how to listen to their children.
Meanwhile at the Avilas, Mercedes Ruehl's attractive Elizabeth, whose dashing macho husband (Victor Rivers) has left her for her cousin, has found consolation with a handsome colleague (A Martinez) at work and has invited him to her family dinner. Elizabeth's son Anthony (Douglas Spain) runs into his father at the supermarket and since poor old dad is alone now that his fling is over, invites him to Thanksgiving.
Explaining that he can't be himself at home, the eldest Nguyen son Jimmy (Will Yun Lee), a college student, has opted to spend the holiday with his new girlfriend, Elizabeth's daughter Gina (Isidra Vega), telling his parents he's busy studying.
Lainie Kazan's Ruth Seelig and her husband, Herb (Maury Chaykin). accept uneasily though lovingly the lesbian relationship their daughter (Kyra Sedgewick) has with another woman (Julianna Margulies), yet Ruth is eager to conceal it from her husband's tiresome elderly relatives (Estelle Harris and Ralph Manza, both very funny).
"What's Cooking?" affords many actors the opportunity to shine. Ann Weldon sparkles and glows, her matriarch as exasperating as she is amusing. Woodard typically dives in deeply to show us a smart, accomplished woman trying to hold herself together in the face of more strain than we had ever imagined.
Kazan's Ruth, like Woodard's Audrey, is striving unobtrusively to be the best cook and hostess possible while trying to ensure that her Thanksgiving meal goes smoothly, knowing she is faced with a potentially volatile situation. Even the smallest roles are clearly defined: Mariam Parris is a hoot as one of Audrey's guests, the outspoken counterculture daughter of one of her husband's colleagues.
In covering so much territory with such unexpected depth, "What's Cooking?" benefits crucially from Stuart Blatt's on-the-money production design with its revealing details. The Seeligs almost certainly have lived in the once lily-white neighborhood the longest, and it tells in their formal, slightly passé decor; leave it to Ruth Seelig to cover her dining room table with an old-fashioned lace cloth.
Cinematographer Jong Lin brings a lovely glow to all four households, and Craig Pruess' score enhances the film's shifting moods. Of all the films made about contemporary Los Angeles, "What's Cooking?" could well be the one in which the greatest number of Angelenos recognize themselves.
Copyright © Los Angeles Times
"What's Cooking?" directed by Gurinder Chadha; written by Paul Mayeda Berges and Gurinder Chadha; released by Trimark Pictures in the USA.
Anyone who can name his 1964 Buick "Protector" and talk to it like a pony has a philosophy we can learn from. Philbert Bono is the name of the philosopher. He is a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, and near the beginning of "Powwow Highway" he and a friend, Buddy Red Bow, set out to ride Protector from Lame Deer, Mont., to Santa Fe, N. M. They go by way of the Dakotas, because to Bono the best way to get to a place is not always the straightest way.
"Powwow Highway" is the story of their journey, and in one sense it's a road movie and a buddy movie, but in another sense it's a meditation on the way American Indians can understand the land in terms of space, not of time. Philbert never states it in so many words, but it's clear he doesn't think of a trip to Santa Fe in terms of hours or miles, but in terms of the places he must visit between here and there to make it into a journey and not simply the physical relocation of his body.
The movie supplies a plot in order to explain why the two Indians need to take their journey, but the plot is the least interesting element of the film. It involves a scheme against Buddy, who is a tribal activist and opposes a phony land-rights grab that's being directed at some Indian territories. His sister is thrown into jail in Santa Fe, and he must go there to bail her out, and that will get him out of Montana at a crucial time. And so on.
The plot is not the point. What "Powwow Highway" does best is to create two unforgettable characters and give them some time together. It places them within a large network of their Indian friends so we get a sense of the way their community still shares and thrives. As Philbert points Protector east instead of south, as he visits friends and sacred Indian places along the road, he doesn't try to justify what he's doing. It comes from inside. And it comes, we sense, from a very old Indian way of looking at things. Buddy is much more modern and impatient - he's Type A - but as their journey unfolds, he can begin to see the sense of it.
The movie develops a certain magical intensity during the journey, and much of that comes from the chemistry between the two lead actors. Philbert is played by Gary Farmer, a tall, huge man with a long mane of black hair and a gentle disposition. He speaks softly and sees things with a blinding directness. Buddy (A Martinez) is more "modern," more political, angrier. Their friendship has survived their differences. The movie was shot entirely on location, and the set decoration, I suspect, consists of whatever the camera found in its way. (If this is not so, it is a great tribute to the filmmakers, who made it seem that way.) We visit trailer parks and dispossessed suburbs and pool halls and convenience stores. We watch the dawn in more than one state, and we get the sense of the life on the road in a way that is both modern (highways, traffic signals) and timeless (the oneness of the land and the journey). And although I have made this all sound important and mystical, "Powwow Highway" is at heart a comedy, and even a bit of a thriller, although the way they spring Buddy's sister from prison belongs to the comedy and not the thriller.
The movie is based on a novel by David Seals, which I have not read; the story resembles the tone in some of W. P. Kinsella's stories about North American Indians. In Buddy it shows the somewhat fading anger of a man who once was a firebrand in the American Indian Movement (he has a concise, bitter speech about the programs "for" the Indians that will be an education for some viewers). In Philbert it finds a supplement to that anger in a man whose sheer, unshakable serenity is a political statement of its own.
One of the reasons we go to movies is to meet people we have not met before. It will be a long time before I forget Farmer, who disappears into the Philbert role so completely we almost think he is this simple, openhearted man - until we learn he's an actor and teacher from near Toronto. It's one of the most wholly convincing performances I've seen.
Most of the people who go to see "Powwow Highway" will already have seen "Rainman," the box-office best seller. Will they notice how similar the movies are in structure? Philbert does not have any sort of mental handicap, as the man with autism does in "Rainman," but he has a similar, absolutely direct simplicity. Both characters state facts. They catalog the obvious. Deep beneath the simplicity of Philbert's statements is a serene profundity (we cannot be quite sure what lies at the bottom of the autistic's statements). In both movies the other man - younger, ambitious, impatient - learns from the older. Meanwhile, in both movies, the men become friends while they drive in ancient Buicks down the limitless highways of America.
Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.
Warner Bros. and HandMade Films present a film directed by Jonathan Wacks and produced by Jan Wieringa. Screenplay by Janet Heaney and Jean Stawarz, based on the novel by David Seals. Photographed by Toyomichi Kurita. Edited by James Stewart. Music by Barry Goldberg. Running time: 91 minutes. Classified R
In the popular imagination, American Indians have usually been defined in the past tense. There's a museum mustiness in the treatment of native peoples in films, an approach that tends toward over-reverent, one-dimensional characterizations, predictable story lines and nostalgia for the good old days of an Eden before European contact. From "F Troop" to the more recent well-intentioned but stultifying TNT cable network movies honoring native people past and present, Hollywood Indians generally lack the vibrancy and immediacy of flesh and blood human beings. They stand for ideas rather than have them on their own.
"Grand Avenue," an HBO "original drama event" that has Its premiere tonight at 8, does not avoid all of the genre's pitfalls, but it takes a giant step toward offering a gritty and unsparing depiction of contemporary urban Indian life. Based upon Greg Sarris's stunning 1995 collection of interrelated short stories of the same title-and adapted by Mr. Sarris-the three-hour presentation turns a reverse telescope on a situation that's invisible to most Americans but a reality for approximately half of this nation's 2.2 million Indians.
What, native artists are often asked, constitutes the "Indian" in their work? Take away the beads and feathers, take away the brave on horseback framed by a sun set, take away the fringe and the broken English and the faraway look in the eye, and what's left?
Unlike movies such as "Dances With Wolves" and "Pocahontas," "Grand Avenue" has the courage to propose an answer to these questions. The men and women who inhabit this intricately woven tale are in many senses "modern Americans." They watch television, eat fast food, dress like everyone else. They speak an idiomatic slang that reflects a lack of high-quality formal education rather than a stilted jargon created by some non-lndian screenwriter. They face the same problems that others in their economic strata do: inadequate child care, unsafe streets, a lack of opportunity. And yet they are, to the eye who knows how to recognize them, undeniably "Indian."
As people related by blood and common experience, their ultimate strength, as well as their immediate liability, is their staunch refusal to criticize one another-which is to say they accept fallibility, accept human frailty, accept failure, as part of life. They never give up on the possibility of redemption, these flawed but brave individuals. They're always starting over, drawing from a seemingly inexhaustible well of crazy optimism, as if they believe that next time, through an uncontrollable chain of circumstances, everything will work out fine, all the dreams will come true, all the promises will be kept.
There are many ways psychologists could describe this syndrome, this against-all-odds belief in hope, but the words that the characters in "Grand Avenue" would use, the words that the people upon whom the book and the screenplay are based might use, are simply "unconditional love."
The idea for a film of "Grand Avenue" originated at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, and the film is the first television project of Mr. Redford's Wildwood Enterprises, with Elsboy Entertainment (he is executive producer with Paul Aaron and Rachel Pfeffer). HBO has given the drama first-class backing. Under the direction of Dan Sackheim (an Emmy Award winner for his work on "N.Y.P.D Blue"), the rather episodic plot flows smoothly, and the music by Peter Melnick, which Is performed by Rita Coolidge, provides an understated, enhancing ambiance.
Set primarily in a Santa Rosa, California, neighborhood populated by blacks, Hispanics and off-reservaaon Indians, "Grand Avenue" follows the fortunes of three interrelated families as they struggle to survive a series of catastrophes. Mollie (Sheila Tousey), a Pomo woman with three children-Justine (Deeny Dakota), Alice (Dianne Debassige) and Sheldon (Cody Lightning)-returns to the town of her birth after the death of her husband on a Lokaya reservation. Aided by her cousin Anna (Jenny Gago), she sets up housekeeping in a run down rental house. In no time, Mollie loses her job as a motel maid, the sexually active Justine gets involved with a gang member and an old boyfriend surfaces. He is Steven Toms (A Martinez), an upwardly mobile teacher married to an Apache woman.
Two characters stand in sharp contrast to the tempestuous doings of the rest of the neighborhood. Nellie (Tantoo Cardinal) is a serene medicine woman, gardener and traditional Pomo basket-weaver. Her immaculate house is proof of her mental stability; her pressed ribbon dresses advertise her ties to her Indian roots. She takes an interest in Alice, Mollie's second daughter, and teaches her the craft of basket-making, suggesting that amid all the distractions of contemporary life, a continuity with a tribal past will be kept alive.
Alice is the single most interesting element m "Grand Avenue." She is a survivor, a girl forced to grow up too quickly but a person who resists the loss of a basic innocence. Clearly she has stepped into the mothering role vacated by the often weak and self-pitying Mollie, and manages to communicate a quiet, uncomplaining strength in times of crisis. She more than anyone else holds the family together, and the startlingly fresh and powerful performance by Ms. Debassige anchors the film and gives it a deep resonance.
Mr. Sarris, who in his many roles (writer, adapter, co-producer) might be considered the auteur of "Grand Avenue," knows whereof he speaks. A professor of literature at the University of Caiifornia at Los Angeles and of Irish, Fllipino, Jewish, Pomo and Miwok background, he grew up in Santa Rosa and experienced the turbuIence of its mean streets firsthand. He is the author of several scholarly works; his fiction debut, "Grand Avenue," drew rave reviews for its Iyricism and insight into the complex psychology of contemporary Indian life.
His influence in the film surfaces in many subtle but authentic ways: the casual notice of a woman cooking fry bread on the stove, the right choice of a particular new dress that Mollie selects, the quiet acceptance of hardship and the surprise at good fortune evinced by men and women used to being down on their luck. One hopes that viewers of "Grand Avenue" will be motivated to seek out the more fully realized version of the story, his heart-wrenching book.
"Grand Avenue" makes no excuses for its melodramatic plot twists; urban strife is not delicate. Events on the street jag and dip like a seismograph during an earthquake. Almost as in physics, each action has an equal and opposite reaction, each tentative step forward away from despair is answered by seemingly random violence, bad luck or insurmountable odds. The only element always found in American Indian communities that is largely missing from the film is the survival humor, the shared, forced comedy to which Indian people must so often resort and that is missed or misunderstood by most mainstream observers.
Perhaps the symmetries of "Grand Avenue" are a bit neat and strained-the film begins with a funeral and ends with one. Perhaps the remission of an illness ls a little too perfectiy timed. Perhaps the deus ex machina of a benevolent father-figure, an Aicoholics Anonymous enthusiast (August Schellenberg), is just slightly too convenient. Perhaps the stylish, good taste of the self-congratulatory medicine woman is a bit too Martha Stewart. But the value of "Grand Avenue" is redeemed by the full-hearted performances. The neatly tied ends are balanced by keenly observed little details, the feeling that the film evolved from a painful reality.
This Is a movie in which the accumulation of eclectic moments finally overcomes the burden of an inevitable, discouraging theme, in which the finely tuned characterizations breathe life into shopworn silhouettes, in whlch acute cinematography eclipses overworked themes. The viewer comes away from "Grand Avenue" with a deeper awareness, an awakened sensibility, that goes beyond typical television-movie didacticism. We have a sense of what it is like to be on the skids in Santa Rosa, an empathy rather than a sympathy for the durable men and women we've watched struggle with thelr demons. This is an identification that transcends ethnicity or economics and approaches a "there but for fortune" sort of recognition. And that, in the long history of tribal people on the little screen, is a downright leap.
At the end of "Grand Avenue" all the surviving characters are suffused with a sense of irrational hope. Who are we to tell them they're wrong?
Copyright © New York Times
Michael Dorris, an adjunct professor of Native American studies and anthropology at Dartmouth College, is the author of two forthcoming novels, "Sees Behind Trees," for young people, and "Cloud Chamber."
