NO RESERVATIONS is a prime example of everything that is wrong with Hollywood remakes of terrific foreign language films. Take challenging characters, piquant situations, homogenize the high heckola out of them and, poof, everything that was wonderful in the original is gone. To be fair, even without knowing MOSTLY MARTHA, said original, there is little here worth seeing.
It starts in a therapist’s office. Executive chef Kate (Catherine Zeta-Jones) has been ordered there by her boss (Patricia Clarkson) at the trendy New York restaurant where she works for, well, that’s the start of the problems here. We’re never clued in on what it was that forced Kate into therapy. And the peculiarity of Kate’s reaction to the process is never established. Sure, she spends her sessions recounting her favorite recipes to the therapist (Bob Balaban). But everyone has their own path to a full return to emotional health. If speaking in loving terms about the best way to prepare quail is Kate’s, who are we to judge? If, further, she brings her therapist the positive results of her culinary experiments, who is to say that it can’t be a positive part of the therapy? Perhaps if the screenwriters had actually given Kate a bad attitude of some sort, it would all fall into place. Alas, Kate, while dedicated to her job, is never more than a little cranky in the workplace when the dinner rush is on, and never more than just a little stand-offish with the downstairs neighbor who wants to date her. To add to the confusion, there are the guys as the fish market, to which Kate hies herself hither every morning a the crack of dawn. They adore her, she adores them, it’s all very cozy as they banter back and forth. It doesn’t help that Zeta-Jones goes soft when she should be prickly. Even when telling off a customer who is unhappy with the way she has prepared the foie gras, it’s more about reciting the correct way to cook the dish rather than righteous indignation. And the self-imposed time-outs in the restaurants walk-in fridge seem more like a way of cooling off from the hot kitchen that cooling off emotionally.
Into Kate’s life of order (we are told, though never really shown that Kate is all about rules), comes a suddenly orphaned niece, Zoe (Abigail Breslin). Aside from the kid’s stuffed animal collection overflowing Kate’s spare bedroom, and her disinclination to eat the haute cuisine that Kate offers up (even fish sticks get the nouvelle cuisine approach), things are pretty smooth aside from Kate once forgetting to pick Zoe up from school. As with all the other characters, Zoe is criminally underwritten, leaving poor Breslin, so terrific in LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, winging it. To further complicate Kate’s life, there’s the sous-chef that her boss brings in while Kate is adjusting to her new life as a single mom and the regular sous-chef is about to give birth. The new guy is Nick (Aaron Eckhart). He’s wild and crazy with wacky prints on his kitchen scrubs and a penchant for belting out opera with a plucked quail in one hand and a flaming sauté pan in the other. Eckhart, an actor of considerable talent and even more charisma, valiantly breathes into Nick as much life as humanly possible, but aside from that underwritten problem, he, like the rest of the cast, is given execrable dialogue with which to work. Never mind that he and Zeta-Jones never quite work up any chemistry.
It’s a foregone conclusion that these two will get together, dearth of chemistry notwithstanding, and so with a tedious predictability she rebuffs, he counters, and finally she succumbs. He also gets Zoe to eat, but that is a side issue.
Generally, a montage played out under a catchy song is a cheat as far as advancing the storyline, but considering the writing here, the several that pop up with alarming frequency come as something of a relief. Even that is fouled up though. Sometimes, when a film is bad and going downhill fast, it’s fun to ponder just how bad it can get. And then NO RESERVATIONS, during one of those song montages that are otherwise a boon and a surcease from sorrow, actually does the photo booth sequence. The hopelessly hokey cliche where our three leads all crowd together and make funny faces and oh, aren’t they all having so much fun and isn’t that fun just infectious. In a word. No.
NO RESERVATIONS is forced, flat, slapdash and superficial. There’s no sense of conviction, no hint of tension about where anything will go, from any party involved, and even the tiramisu (prepared in Tupperware™ yet) fails to be tempting, or even moderately interesting. Any film that can make one of dessert-doms most divine creations seem drab isn’t just bad, it’s criminal.
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