The Thanksgiving idyll is straightforwardly celebratory — a happy excuse for loved ones near and far to get together — but so often spillage from old and emerging interpersonal wounds taint prospects of what the gathering could be. In the charming, Altman-esque What’s Cooking? (2000), we oscillate between four unwittingly connected families hailing from different cultures — Latinx, Jewish, Vietnamese, and African-American — trying desperately, but struggling, to keep things pleasant over the holiday.
There seems not a personal nook among any of these families uncluttered by something that could turn things explosive if prodded at enough. Here are just a few examples, because it would take the whole piece to list them all out: a woman who has brought her long-time girlfriend to her family’s gathering feeling forced to keep up a charade of straightness, the girlfriend passed as just a good friend. A young man who has invited his father to the festivities despite him being practically exiled for cheating on his mother. (Who has since bagged a boyfriend she plans to invite.) A man who’s welcomed his boss, the city’s ultra-conservative mayor, to the home even though he knows that his politically progressive son is responsible for a recent incident where some young people threw some paint at the politician during a photo op as a form of protest.
Inevitably all of those things will explode at the dinner table at some point or another, along with lots of other problems. It’s a wonder that director Gurinder Chadha, who also wrote the script with her filmmaker husband, Paul Mayeda Berges, so ably keeps everything largely feeling warm rather than overly dependent on discord as a means of dramatic movement. I think much of that has to do with how convincingly the pair develops the underlying sense of love among these families who nonetheless vary in how much they genuinely seem to like each other as people, and how they manage to keep the majority of the characters feeling distinct rather than like caricatures defined by the trait they best represent in their families.
Joan Chen, Kristy Wu, and Kieu Chinh in What’s Cooking?
You come to have deep affection for so many of them: Kyra Sedgwick and the recently disgraced Julianna Margulies as good-sport lesbians muting their love to appease everybody else; Mercedes Ruehl as a take-no-shit woman getting her groove back after marital betrayal; Alfre Woodard as a wife trying not to lose her mind as her mother-in-law nitpicks at her like she were playing a game where the goal is prompting a breakdown.
What’s Cooking? is especially dynamic where it really should be: when these families are at last seated for dinner — a passive position that doesn’t last long for everybody depending on how much the friction at the table stirs them — and conversations inevitably shift from superficially pleasant into areas that might not sit right with others. The movie upholds familiar clichés about what might turn a Thanksgiving table into a fount of awkwardness, but Chadha and Berges have the kind of ear for dialogue that makes the resulting scenes feel like dramatizations of surveillance audio they’d secretly recorded.
Almost nothing bad that happens in What’s Cooking? is ultimately unfixable — at least when we’re talking about the parts of these people’s lives that are especially vital to their happiness — though it isn’t drippily sentimental when arriving at new areas of understanding. What’s Cooking? strikes the right balance between tender and bruising; it’s a holiday movie that gives you the heartwarming touches for which you may seek one out without insulting your intelligence in the process.
Peterson Reviews 