Are Diva Chef Movies and TV Shows Ever Going to End?
I thought "The Menu" (2022) did a great job of sticking the fork in all the tropes about diva chefs, haute cuisine restaurants and self-deleting over not getting enough Michelin stars. But here we are in 2025 with season 3 of "The Bear"
I haven't seen the show but let me guess: The Bear is an ambitious but over-driven young culinary pro with a dream. He cares about nothing more than his passion for the highest cuisine. He has a drug habit and a long-suffering girlfriend. He abuses staff but they accept it because he is a perfectionist, etc. etc.
Saw the movie "Pig" last night at $5 Tuesdays. The trailer was intriguing and it got a 97% on RottenTomatoes and 8.2 on MetaCritic. I had some reservations because it is a low budget film with Nicholas Cage in the lead role but the reviewers assured me "Pig defies the hogwash of expectations with a beautiful odyssey of loss and love anchored by Nicolas Cage's affectingly raw performance."
Okay fine. Cage is over-used but he can be good. He was great in "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent", a self-parody. The premise is "a truffle-hunter who lives alone in the Oregon wilderness and must return to his past in Portland in search of his beloved foraging pig after she is kidnapped." I thought it might avoid or explode all the restaurant diva tropes that were popular in that subgenre until "The Menu" (2022) put a fork in it.
Wrong. The broken dreams aspect was the core of the film. The pig is the MacGuffin but we don't see enough of Cage and the pig at the beginning to really connect with either of them and we need to. We need to care about this broken person who has withdrawn from the world or else we don't wonder why and that is supposed to be the hook -- WHY is he like this? You get the answers as the movie rolls along but
The answers are buried under the absurdities of setting the movie in Portland(!). They had considered setting it in France or Spain but the budget was $3-million so Portland. The character, Amir, who buys truffles from Cage sells them in Portland and competes with his father's business. So there is a multi million dollar underground truffle ring in Portland? The actor who plays Amir is terrible. Cage is good and very measured in his role but he does the whole movie in heavy make-up, (scars, dirt, dried blood, matted hair) and has many close-ups where the prosthetics are obvious. So you are way too aware you are watching Cage in laytex fakery throughout.
Midway through his search, cage takes Amir to an underground fight club for restaurant workers. It is a cross between Fight Club and the worst scenes in "Babylon" (2022). Tropes inside of tropes. Cage lets a waiter beat him up in order to get to some dude who may have info on his pig. It makes no sense but Cage has even more make-up and prosthetics in the scenes that follow that one. And they shake the camera in certain scenes (!?) Just shake it like if you are walking and shoot without stabilization or a gimble but they aren't walking and they do have a gimble so I guess it is supposed to convey Cage's state of mind.
Despite all that it was okay. Not great. Not a total disaster but that whole genre is really tired. Pig began preproduction in 2019 which explains why it feels done. Our theater is doing a series on "Lost movies of Covid" and Pig came out in 2021 when theaters were closed. But even 6 years and 20 more diva chefs later we get "The Bear".
Where are the restaurant movies that AREN'T about the diva chef? Just once a waiter or a supplier or the bankrupt broken-dreams owner could be the protagonist. I thought Pig was going to explore the supplier but this supplier turns out to be a broken diva chef one more time. To that end, a documentary was released in 2020 at Sundance called "The Truffle Hunters" about "A group of aging men and their dogs hunt in the woods in Northern Italy for a prized quarry—the Alba truffle. Perhaps due to some confusion between the two, that movie also got 97% on RottenTomatoes and 8.2 on MetaCritic (?)
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