The refrain Amanda (Sarah Michelle Gellar) usually offers when somebody asks how her restaurant, the Southern Cross, is doing is that “business is a little slow.” But that’s just a nice way of saying that disaster is impending, and that that disaster is all she can ever think about.
Ever since she took over the mantle of her late mother’s establishment, which has been passed down in her family for the last 70 years, Amanda has been at a complete loss, her down-to-her-fingertips lack of any sort of cooking ability unable to be overlooked by anybody except the small handful of regulars who loved her mother so much that they can’t bring themselves to betray her still-grieving daughter. (How Amanda’s mother apparently never taught her basic cooking skills, or how to make any of the restaurant’s classic recipes, is a question the film does not answer.)
Nebulous feelings of doom are taken a step further when, a little into Simply Irresistible (1999), Amanda gets word that rent is raising to an impossible-to-meet $5,000 a month. But her luck will change, not through the twists of fate a movie of a piece with this one might offer — Amanda making a concerted effort to improve the food and succeeding; passionate community members rallying and reversing the restaurant’s fortune — but with literal magic. At a farmers market, she’s urged by a funny little man in a hat to buy a crab from him — a crab, the audience soon understands, bequeathed the sort of magical power that can make inspired dishes appear essentially out of nowhere, turning Amanda from mediocre to godly to those in the know within days.
Sarah Michelle Gellar and Sean Patrick Flannery in Simply Irresistible.
Things for the Southern Cross start to look up with this crab sitting in the corner of the kitchen, connivingly squinting its eyes and clacking its claws. The upturn dovetails with Amanda’s burgeoning romance with Tom (Sean Patrick Flannery), a neurotic Fifth Avenue department-store executive opening a lavish new restaurant inside the building with black-and-white zigzag floors and walls made of mirrors. It’s suggested the crab’s magic isn’t limited to the culinary. Consider that, one evening, while Tom and Amanda are kissing in the kitchen, they start inexplicably floating in the air while they’re lost in romantic reverie, their lips unlocking only when their heads hit the ceiling.
The rom-com-style warm fuzzies Simply Irresistible is finally meant to incur come from Amanda’s eventual ability to cook well, and to love, without the assistance of something that brings both to her without trying. Just as the rest of this neither-that-good-nor-that-bad movie is, it’s a silly, contrived development in a film I found difficult to dislike, not because its charm goes a long way, but because I respect what it’s trying to do: provide us with the goofily premised, frivolous sort of rom-com that used to proliferate during the Hollywood Golden Age.
Its sense of anachronism is deepened by the performances, which all recall star personae of yore: Gellar doing Debbie Reynolds, the fretful Flannery James Stewart. (With her knowing wit and professional loyalty, Patricia Clarkson, as Tom’s assistant, is also like a neo-Eve Arden.) It’s a movie too harmless, too original, to inspire ill will. If Simply Irresistible could, it comes from the presentation of the food. If this crab’s touch is responsible for caramel eclairs so good that they seem capable of bringing those who devour them to orgasm, the culinary images the film burns into the brain ought to be better than a couple of seafood slices heaped on some sickly green sauce — than a diminutive sprinkling of flowers stirred into sludgy vanilla frosting. Maybe it would help if I were able to taste things for myself, brought to the mercy of a crab who knows just what I need.
Peterson Reviews 