The Menu

There is just so much to say about "The Menu", the horror movie about avant garde dining starring Ralph Fiennes and Anna Taylor Joy. I can't even really spoiler you, because frankly most of the movie is given away in its trailer if not the premise itself.

And you should definitely go see it. But for the few reveals that you still may not know beforehand, consider this spoiler territory from here on.

On a pure entertainment level, this movie has a lot going for it. RF and ATJ are very charismatic and their persona disappears into these roles, neither overdoing it or being cold fish. The pacing is snappy, and the framing device (courses of a menu) for different acts is funny.

It's the ensemble of diners that really make this work, though. The conceit is an ultra fancy restaurant that only has 12 seatings a night, and so in a horror movie like fashion we have a party of 12 characters with obvious foibles who will over time fall victim to the villain in devilish ways. Some of them are written to be easy to hate, and some just to sadly sympathize with, but they all have their own compact backstory and cliche that we get just enough screen presence with to appreciate and not out-stay their welcome. (The chefs are mostly intentionally anonymous, but a few of them are given more character and also extremely entertaining.)

There's the finance bros eating at the finest place as a status symbol. There's the restaurant critic who only cares about what sort of fashion statement and social game the food stands for. There's the food blogger who is eerily obsessed with the food. There's the regulars who come here for the comfort of ritual and don't even notice the food. And there's the couple having an awkward breakup.

And this movie is (mostly) very tight to its themes, about the fallibility of selling out what we love doing. Prostitution comes up frequently, because the movie states that cooking should be something you do as an act of love for the recipient. It's an obvious theme to go for, but they at least execute it well.

There are a couple of sub-themes that are less consistent. One that they are trying to go for is "classism" not in the sense of rich vs poor, but "servers vs takers." Feinnes sees the world divided into people who serve things - chefs, prostitutes, actors - and takers who just consume them (considering the investors who finance him just takers.)  But it really doesn't work - money and status loom too high, making how rich the "servers" are undercut this. And the head chef is far from consistent about this, declaring one of the diners is actually a "server" but deserves to die because his movie sucked. The girl who went to Brown without student loans is "upper-class/taker" but the date in the haute couture dress is working class/server.

He's the villain so it's okay for him to be inconsistent (they in fact highlight this with him contradicting himself and being called out on it), but it undercuts said message that this is "about class."

The other sub-theme I thought was delivered very well, but is frontloaded to only the first half of the movie: approval and the Big Other. For the first hour everyone seems motivated by how they feel about "approval." The main character's foodie date is terrified of the chef not approving of him. Whereas the critic assumes everyone should be desperate for *her* approval. Whereas the chef really only cares about the approval of the one non-foodie here who got invited at the last minute and seems to not enjoy the food. 

So, over all a good time. The problem is...

I've never liked a movie so much that I disagreed with so drastically. 

For one, they really get the foodie world and high dining wrong. They are desperate to paint it as "food that isn't actually good and filling but people are just obsessed with as part of some status signaling game." But that simply isn't true.

This sort of 12-course tasting menu dining is expensive yes - think $300 a person or more, before the wine pairings - but it tends to be a multi-hour event for an evening's "experience" more akin to going to a concert than sustenance. But you get enough food that will leave you stuffed and truly remarkable flavors and texture.

It doesn't require $1200 and it doesn't require booking months in advance. Alinea and Eleven Madison Park are two of the world's best restaurants (as in, they've literally won "best restaurant in the world" awards) and you can just buy a ticket for a dining spot at them next week like you were purchasing for a concert. https://www.exploretock.com/alinea/

(There's better, less known places of course. And there's terrible places that still charge you half a grand. But both are the exception by and large.)

This sounds like a petty complaint of course, and I don't like criticizing movies for lack of realism - that's not the point of the story after all. But it matters in this case.

Why?

Because the movie is relentlessly about the difference between the Social and the Real. The Real is the object level of "is the food actually good and filling?" and the Social is just a meta-level signaling game where food can be terrible or substanceless but that doesn't matter because it's really just about showing off. Both our Final Girl and the main villain care about the Real of the food - she doesn't buy into any of the fancyness and he is serving a deliberately awful meal to mock his customer's Social desires (until she reminds him of the Real of food... serving a good, greasy cheeseburger.) They make clear how dumb it is to enjoy fake food because "the chef is telling a story."

[There is also a good implicit comparison between dining and horror movies here. A horror movie after all is a movie designed to make you feel unpleasant in various ways (tension, scares, the triumph of evil) because of the result of the overall experience.]

Except it's all undercut because we have no Real. When he finally serves the delicious cheeseburger, we can't taste it. And the movie isn't telling us truthfully about the nature of fancy restaurants. The movie's experience of food is just a meta level artistic game. The cheeseburger is just as fake to us as the "bread and assortments without bread."