Ratatouille: A very ratty dish
September 8th 2007 04:49
Someone on the blogosphere has already pronounced that Remy the Rat is an animated avatar of Howard Roark. Is he?
He does have some beautiful Rand-like aphorisms in the movie:
"Your limit is you soul."
"A cook makes while a thief takes!"
"But humans, they are not content, they create things..."
" Remy, you cannot change nature."
"But nature changes dad,.."
"I am going to walk .... forward!"
(All quoted from memory.)
Remy is the second son of the leader of a rat colony and unlike the rest of his tribe, he is not merely content with scrounging things from garbage bins. He has a highly developed sense of smell and uses that to get faimiliar with human cooking. He also catches the late French chef Gusteau and becomes a self-appointed disciple.
When he is broken up from his family in a well-executed escape, Remy ends up, where else but in Gusteau's restaurant ! The once famous restaurant has since been run down by the adverse notice of a critic and Gusteau died of a heart break. Since then, his good name has been used by an understudy Skinner who is less of a cook and more of a mass merchandiser. Here, Linguini a lanky and clumsy lad is offered the post of a garbage boy. Once Remy stops the boy from ruining a soup which quickly finds its way to a delighted customer, there's no stopping the fate as the rat and the garbage boy combine to pull off a Cyrano De Bergerac of French cuisine.
The movie is a visual feast but there are a couple of drawbacks. The secondary plot used to further the story, Linguing being the son of Gusteau, does nothing much to further our enjoyment. None of the human characters are appealingly drawn and Linguini is the worst of the lot. Remy despite having some choice lines is quite wishy-washy. The best drawn characters are Remy's brother and Gusteau's guiding spirit. Also, except for Peter O'Toole's excellent British snobbery, I did not like the voiceovers of others. Jeanne Garafelo as the love interest is a disaster.
I admit it is quite a pleasant diversion but is it a Randian dish in disguise? Not quite. The whole movie has an undercurrent of elitist distaste for "consumerist" type of capitalism. The setting of Paris itself is suspect. The portrayal of the rat colony is not free from the usual portrayals of the repressed-will-take-over-the- world kind of subtext to it. The motto dished out by the movie, Anyone Can Cook, looks like a mantra of egalitarianism. Also, the snooty food critic, arguably the movie's chief villain, is named Anton Ego; now, in Rand's world that would be the name of Remy. It is small details like this that bother me somewhat.
One thing can be said for the movie though, is that if this is where it is coming from, it does not jam down those "messages" down our throats. It is more of a subtle flavoring.
And that is why, I will not firmly categorise it as one more trashy "subversive" agitprop produced by the Brotherhood. It is a pleasant enough movie but I cannot wholly embrace it either.
I can't quite make my mind over it even though I found it fairly enjoyable.
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