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November 2000 Issue

Guess Who's Coming to Thanksgiving Dinner

Andrew Bender reviews What's Cooking?

Thanksgiving has come to be the Seinfeld of holidays. It's about nothing.

It once had a meaning, as we all know, but it's long since devolved into an excuse to watch football with your Uncle Howard and stuff yourself silly before drifting into a tryptophan haze. Movies like Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Avalon (with its immortal "You cut da toikey?" scene) have only trivialized it further.

But one thing remains the same: the first Thanksgiving was about getting together en famille, and in her new film What's Cooking?, writer/director Gurinder Chadha updates Thanksgiving in a way the pilgrims couldn't have imagined.

Consider the Seeligs, one of four ethnic families whose lives are interwoven in this ensemble piece. Mother Ruth and father Herb (Lainie Kazan and Maury Chaikin), are middle-aged Jewish folks celebrating the holidays with their daughter Rachel (Kyra Sedgwick) and her lover Carla (Julianna Margulies, formerly of ER, with straight hair).

Well-meaning though they are, they haven't adjusted to Rachel-and-Carla, and when Ruth goes to show off her new cappuccino machine by bringing the girls breakfast in bed in Rachel's old room, she's, well, embarrassed to find that the twin beds have been pushed together.

The other families are facing their own, fully 21st Century, interpersonal problems and internal strifes. Alfre Woodard and Dennis Haysbert head an upscale African-American family struggling with assimilation into a white world, Mercedes Ruehl is the matron of a Latino clan that's recently undergone a divorce, and Joan Chen anchors a Vietnamese immigrant family shamed by their daughter's new-found interracial love.

The film's opening shot is of an ad featuring a white bread American family. But this being L.A., where everyone knows that white bread is for the birds, What's Cooking? offers some of the best food scenes since Big Night.

The Mexican family serves tamales, guacamole, and tortillas; the Vietnamese family slathers its turkey in chili paste and makes spring rolls; the Jewish family sets out stuffed kishka (which remains uneaten); and despite Alfre Woodard's character's best efforts to create a Martha Stewart Thanksgiving (shiitake mushroom stuffing and perfectly grilled vegetables), Southern-style macaroni and cheese finds its way to her table.

Eat before you see this movie--the colorful Mexican dinner in particular made me glad I live in L.A.

I can't vouch for the other ethnicities, but the Jewish family scenes certainly rang true. Chaikin's Herb sits in his hot tub and gives Carla an encyclopedic dissertation on its qualities (good for circulation, but bad for the kidneys if you stay in too long), and there was appropriate haranguing over politics and current events over the dinner table.

In my favorite performance, Aunt Bee, played by Estelle Harris (a.k.a. George's mother on Seinfeld and Mrs. Potato Head in Toy Story 2), probes into Rachel's love life with earnest inquisitiveness that, thankfully, stops short of Mrs. Kravitz-ness.

It would have been easy to reduce the characters to ethnic stereotypes, but Chanda makes sure that her characters are as individual as one can get in a film with some 20 principals. Sometimes the story lines drift toward the trite, as does the music, but the strong acting held my attention.

It's hard to fail with such an accomplished cast. Woodard and Chen are compelling as torn wives and mothers (the Shanghai-born Chen even learned some Vietnamese). Sedgwick and Margulies are poster-perfect lovers (I heard more than one person call them "hot"). Kazan (My Favorite Year, TV's The Nanny) is the image of a caring but conflicted mother, and Ruehl's character is strong, smart, independent and sexy.

By contrast, most of the leading men, particularly Dennis Haysbert, Will Yun Lee and A. Martinez, talented actors all, aren't given much to do besides being eye candy.

I was also quite impressed that Chadha (an ethnic Indian born in Kenya and raised in Britain, whose previous work includes the Indo-British Bhaji on the Beach) had such a perceptive grasp of American ethnicities. Call her the next Ang Lee, whose Taiwanese birth did not prevent him from realistic portrayals of Victorian England (Sense and Sensibility) or '70s suburban America (The Ice Storm).

What's Cooking? ain't no traditional Thanksgiving, pilgrim, but, I bet it would please the original celebrants. It reintroduces the holiday as one of tolerance and acceptance of others--particularly one's own family, faults and all.

What's Cooking? Rated PG-13. Running time 106 minutes. Directed by Gurinder Chadha. Written by Gurinder Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges. Starring: Joan Chen, Julianna Margulies, Mercedes Ruehl, Kyra Sedgwick, Alfre Woodard. www.whatscookingthefilm.com

Los Angeles-based Andrew Bender reviews films for various JFL websites and writes about culture, travel, and food for publications including the Los Angeles Times, Travel & Leisure, and Fortune. This former production company executive and sometime screenwriter also reviews restaurants (and we're keeping his identity secret by not posting his photo).

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