| NO RESERVATIONS |
 2007 - USADirector: Scott Hicks
- Reviewed by Linda
Kate (Zeta-Jones) is a professional chef whose life is full of order, precision, and cooking. If someone threatens her order (like a customer not liking her food), she explodes with disbelief (and has to cool down in the walk-in refrigerator. She lives alone in a perfect, orderly New York City apartment, and she goes to therapy mainly to describe food in great detail to her therapist. But one day Kate's sister is killed in a car accident, and Kate suddenly inherits her 9-year-old niece Zoe (Abigail Breslin) that she barely knows. On top of that, while she is dealing with the tragedy, her boss (Patricia Clarkson) hires a new brash and exuberant sous chef named Nick (Aaron Eckhart) without even consulting Kate. The nerve! No Reservations tries to advertise itself as a romantic comedy, which it isn't really, or as a food movie, which it kind of is. But it is really a very somber drama about two sad lonely people (Kate and Zoe) suddenly being forced to completely rearrange their lives for each other. There are not many sparks between Eckhart's parachute-pant-wearing, Italian-singing chef and Zeta-Jones' frosty, emotionally repressed ice-queen to make the romance particularly interesting. In fact, my cohort pointed out that young Abigail Breslin completely out-acted her elders in her few scenes. The problem with No Reservations is that it is, well, too reserved. I understand that Kate has to be reserved in order to blossom, to be pulled out of her controlled shell by Nick, but she is so void that she is simply not that captivating. Not only that, but despite their collective physical beauty, Zeta-Jones and Eckhart have no chemistry together. Watching this film is like seeing a gorgeous platter of food that holds so much promise—then taking a big ol' bite and finding it surprisingly without taste. DVD NOTESThere is only one extra worth bothering with on the No Reservations DVD, but luckily it's a good one. In fact, it is almost more interesting than the film itself. The Food Network's show "Unwrapped" goes behind the scenes on the movie set, talking to the actors who had to learn how to at least look like they were professional chefs, and also interviews the real professionals who trained them. Aaron Eckhart is particularly entertaining as he talks about how he studied the body language of chefs (which finger they dipped to taste, what they did with their hand towels in the kitchen, etc.). |
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No Reservations, despite its star wattage of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart kinda bombed in the theater. It probably didn't help that it was a foodie-movie beaten to the cineplexes by a certain animated Pixar film starring a rat. And it also doesn't really help that it was almost a scene-for-scene remake of the German film Mostly Martha—a film suffered from some problems that No Reservations manages to duplicate perfectly, for better or for worse.
