This Is The Life

Ratatouille. Now showing in theaters everywhere.

Directed and written by Brad Bird

Someday, audiences and critics will wake up from their studio-induced stupor, rub their eyes and realize that Brad Bird is en par with the greatest filmmakers in the firmament. I mean, really, if you see enough movies at the Cineplex, taking in whatever the machine feeds you, you probably get a bit jaded, at the very least confused about what you’ve seen over time. In five years time do you really think you’ll remember your feelings coming out of Spider-Man or the forthcoming Transformers? But even though Bird’s Ratatouille benefits from the largess of the Disney promotional combine, it is a masterpiece–not a small masterpiece, but a classic to be regarded with the best work of Preston Sturges, Vincente Minnelli, Ernst Lubitsch, and Howard Hawks.

This is so much quote-whoring, it’s true, but I think that modern critics all like to pat themselves on the back that they would have banged a loud drum had they been alive when The Shop Around the Corner hit the screens. Who, today, wouldn’t have acclaimed that the best film of an already strong year? (I’m sure we’d all argue over that film against His Girl Friday… still, neither was a Best Picture nominee.) Well, boys and girls, now’s your chance to say you appreciated a great movie when it was still fresh. Hop on board.

Ratatouille is the story of Remy (voice by the very perfectly-cast Patton Oswalt,) a sewer rat who adores food. Good food. The runniest cheeses, harmonic pairings of cream and stock, the best cuts of meat and fresh vegetables and spices. He lives to try new things, to the extent that he’s willing to risk his life in the five-star kitchens of Paris. Spurred on by the his hero, master chef Gusteau (played by the greatest vocal man in Hollywood today, Brad Garrett), Remy learns the ins and outs of kitchen work, how to engage his sense and create fabulous dishes. And, best of all, how to live.

Gusteau is actually dead. This robust man succumbed to the indignity of losing one of the five stars his eponymous restaurant has earned. But his ghost lives on, following our hero, Remy, trying to impart the wisdom of a lifetime of cooking. Gusteau is a chef from the Julia Child school–brimming with happiness, fat as a spinning planet, and eager to teach. Anyone. His restaurant is the pinnacle of French dining, and yet this man’s most famous, perhaps, for his cookbook, simply titled Anyone Can Cook. Amazingly, it is a rat that most perfectly exemplifies Gusteau’s philosophy.

Poor Remy! On his chosen path he will suffer all manner of indignities, but perhaps most painful are the blows to his ego. In order for Remy to become a chef, naturally he needs a human ally. Vermin are not welcome anywhere but crushed under traps. So enters Linguini (voiced by the animator Lou Romano), an inept but goodhearted mop-handler. In a lovely twist of fate, one that sees Remy unable to escape to safety because he must repair some poorly made soup, our hero is captured by Linguini, who knows this rat can cook. So Remy climbs into the boy’s hat, yanking on tufts of hair and controlling our poor red-headed idiot as if he were a marionette. Eventually, Remy is going to be tested, making the titular dish for the most damning of culinary critics, the acidic Anton Ego (Peter O’Toole, who will not get yet another Oscar for this fine work).

How does Brad Bird get to make these films? Like The Incredibles before it, Ratatouille does not rely on Hollywood in-jokes, scatological humor, or mediocre sitcom drama to chug its plot along. Instead, Ratatouille is infused with the spirit of Preston Sturges. In fact, Linguini could have been played in the past by Eddie Bracken, Sturges’ own bullied-upon, trembling, stuttering and stumbling muse. It’s magnificently written–Ratatouille delights in its own conceit, that anything with taste buds can experience this holy love of eating, and assumes the audience will hang on for the ride, one where your arm grips the side of a motorbike, the rest of the body flailing about with the elasticity of Gumby, and the resignation of Buster Keaton. Bird has given us a movie that asks us to pay attention–and pay close attention–not just to the humor, whose structure is perfect, jokes building for twenty to thirty minutes before payoff, but to the wealth of details, the likes of which have not been matched in animation since Pinocchio. The kitchen itself is a wonder, the marble steps worn away where footsteps have trod, the gleam and reflections off copper pots, the faces of the patrons like something from Mad Magazine in its 1950s prime (Bird also understands perfectly that computer animation has its limits, and only humans must be caricatured to look real).

Better still is Remy’s life–these rats talk to each other, squeak around humans, listen to music. And yet the film is not obsessed with anthropomorphism as in past Disney efforts. These rats are still rats.

Bird also assumes we know what it is to be shocked by a first bite of a perfectly cooked meal. And this is where Ratatouille takes its most surprising turn. When Mr. Waverly Root, journalist, adventurer, and perhaps best of all, devout eater, ventured to France, he discovered the following: As far back as records go, the people of the land now known as France have thought of food in terms of its taste more often than in terms of its nutritive qualities. It is one of the greatest of all of life’s pleasures to have that encounter, that awesome recognition that food isn’t there just to quell those gnawing pangs in the pit of the stomach. After our first bite of ice cream we understand perfectly that food is not just there to build teeth, muscle, brains and then waste. A good meal is there to inspire imagination, trigger memory, to encourage great conversation. It’s a part of most, if not all, religious lore. Very simply, it is fun. And sometimes, most complexly, it kindles love.

A few, not too many, but a few movies have made clumsy attempts at capturing the meaning of eating, and what it does to us as thinking, feeling creatures. Thus far, most have failed–perhaps Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman is the lone picture to have found success (and I’m including the tedious Big Night). That delightful movie drew saliva by simply showing us amazing dinners, from their inception as simple ingredients to the alchemical creation of eye-popping dishes. Without dwelling too long on the meals, Lee gave us a tight, moving, and often-hilarious plot that functioned in addition to the characters gorging themselves.

But that film couldn’t integrate our relationship food seamlessly into its plot. In Ratatouille, however, the titular meal both brings this plot to its moving denouement, but is a great visual essay on food and memory (and criticism). This part of the plot–the meeting of the food critic, the restaurant on its last legs, the fate of Remy–takes, I believe, a good forty minutes in the gestation, and when it hits, the results are moving beyond belief. Eventually the film, ostensibly a children’s picture, becomes a deeply felt meditation on the pleasures of hard work, friendship, eating (of course), and, surprisingly, the often cantankerous (and loving) relationship between artist and critic. The clash between the critic Ego and the chef Remy is not just exciting, not just hilarious, but moving, and might just leave you in tears. It did me.

There has not been a better moment in film this year. But Ratatouille is filled with such moments. Like a Hawks film, you emerge from the theater disappointed a little bit, wishing that the camaraderie onscreen asserted itself in the sunny and disappointing life raging outside. And you wish that our disappointments, when overcome, had triumphs as great, and as real, as Remy’s. But then again, chomping into a crisp water cracker loaded with d’Affinois cheese and a drop of balsamic vinegar isn’t an experience for every meal. You have to appreciate it when you get it. So it is with Ratatouille–savor the film, delight in its pleasures, and work toward honing your palate. Brad Bird has shown us that it is worth every minute.