“Menu”, the movie, is ugly
Suicide is ugly. The movie Menu is a black comedy that toys a little with the beauty of food. It does not play nice, but that’s OK. The plot unravels because the filmmakers were too lazy to develop story lines. That’s lousy, but many movies suck. Towards the end of Menu we’re provided images of two suicides, treated casually. This isn’t questionable, it’s rotten.
The plot involves a group of very wealthy people invited to a restaurant on its own island off an American coast. The people are predictably selfish, self-conscious, status-seeking and silly. This is a new casting motif, White Lotus, Glass Onion, Triangle of Sadness. The restaurant seems based on the Danish haute-cuisine Noma, serving only stuff found around the island, treated with high-school chemistry kit, served on rocks and tableaus. Ralph Fiennes plays its celebrity chef, with a large staff who literally march like military grunts, saying nothing but “yes sir” in unison.
The clientele, it turns out, have all done bad things, and before long we, and they, realize they are going to die. Adam McKay is a producer, and a “Don’t Look Up” vibe sets in, chronicle of deaths foretold, without the luddites refusing to believe. “Don’t Look Up’s” broad strokes took place across the planet and in space. Menu happens almost entirely in one room. Broad strokes overlap into a muddy mess.
A better movie would have used its conceit to have one customer become a sacrifice, perhaps the final course. This would allow the customers’ evil aspects to emerge, as they found one of themselves to victimize. Instead of becoming a movie about a psychotic chef, souless staff, and clueless cliente, it could have been about human nature and the mechanism of high fashion. Which is what this food is. High fashion is fueled by identifying someone to loathe, so making one customer the final course makes sense.
The restaurant’s staff are an embarrasment for a movie that appears to seek a political statement. More shallow and empty than the customers. At one point the chef’s right-hand woman, Elsa, has a knife fight with the movie’s heroine, Anya Taylor-Joy, and loses. As Elsa sputters with a knife in her throat, I expected the inside of a robot to be revealed. That would have made sense. It’s no longer necessary to make your characters robotic, when the post-processing tools exist to make them robots. This lets you focus on what matters, the characters with lines.
But a lazy movie that fails to use the tools at its disposal is just not very good. Instead, Menu turned out bad, with the gratuitous suicides near the end. There’s nothing darkly comic in this, any more than serving each customer a plate of steaming hot shit. Which Menu didn’t do, so that’s a plus. But not plus enough.
