Movie Monday April 3: Burnt

Burnt is my movie this week, and boy does it make my mouth water. The food centric movie is a story of redemption and ego in the fine dining world. I’ve been seeing clips of it for years, so I finally decided to give it a watch.

**Warning, mild spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t watched the movie yet, what are you doing?**

After a drug induced downward spiral that ended his cooking career in Paris, chef Adam Jones (Bradley Cooper) exiles himself to New Orleans. There he spends three years shucking oysters and swears off drugs, alcohol, and women. He travels to London to restart his career and pursue a third Michelin Star. There he convinces former colleague Tony Balerdi (Daniel Brühl) to make him the chef at the Langham Hotel, where Tony is the manager. He agrees to renovate the kitchen on the condition that Adam take weekly drug tests with Tony’s therapist (Emma Thompson). Adam then recruits his team. David (Sam Keeley), a young cook, is the first followed by former sous-chef Michel (Omar Sy), whose restaurant Adam previously sabotaged. He also hires Max (Riccardo Scamarcio), an old friend recently released from prison, and Helene (Sienna Miller), a talented sous-chef. Helene originally turns down Adam’s offer, but accepts after she gets fired. Adam also visits Reece (Matthew Rhys), an old rival, at his restaurant. Adam’s former drug dealer finds out he’s back in Europe and wants to collect an old debt. 

After weeks of preparations, opening night arrives but goes poorly. Adam blames himself and the staff, but especially Helene. He publicly berates and physically intimidates her, so she quits. After Adam makes an appearance on a TV show for publicity, there’s a second opening night. A critic also gives the revised menu a favorable review, which angers Reece and he destroys the dining room at his restaurant. Tony also convinces Helene to return. Adam starts to mentor her. She sees his softer side after he bakes her daughter a birthday cake when Helene can’t get time off. She later accompanies him to Reece’s reopening, where they encounter Anne Marie (Alicia Vikander), Adam’s ex-girlfriend and daughter of his former mentor. She forgives him, which makes him reevaluate his last failures. The next day, after meeting at the fish market, Adam and Helene kiss, but are interrupted by the drug dealer’s thugs. He returns beaten and bruised during service that night. Though injured, Adam stays to cook for two Michelin reviewers. They return their food, saying it’s too spicy. Michel then reveals he sabotaged the dishes as revenge and quits. Adam leaves the restaurant and wanders, eventually ending up at Reece’s restaurant drunk. After a breakdown, the two men part on better terms. Adam also begins group therapy. He later finds out Anne Marie paid his debts and she gives him her fathers old knives. Tony and Helene also tell him that the supposed reviewers were just businessmen. With this second chance, Adam changes how he manages the kitchen, improving teamwork and quality. The restaurant gets its third Michelin Star and Adam has found a new family in Helene and his staff.

So What Did I Think?

Burnt was a lot deeper than I expected. I knew going in it was about a chef making a career comeback, but I didn’t realize how heavy it would get at certain points. By no means is this a bad thing. The plot focuses not only on Adam’s past addiction and how the havoc he left behind in Paris affected friends and colleagues, it also touches on industry wide issues in fine dining kitchens. Verbal abuse, physical intimidation, mind games, all of those are or should be things of the past. At the beginning of the film they’re still seen in the Lantham’s kitchen, but by the end attitudes change. The film was smart to use montages and parallels to give the audience an impression of those changes. In the end the staff are successful because they work together seamlessly and put egos aside. One distinct change is how Adam finally sits down to family meal with his staff instead of remaining separate.

I enjoyed many of the performances in the film, especially Bradley Cooper. He makes Adam, who is extremely unlikable at times, into a sympathetic character with some nuance. There were some characters, like Helene, who were pretty surface level. Sienna Miller did a lot with what she was given, I just felt like her character was there to be a romantic partner and foil for Adam. There was some depth given to her through her relationship with her daughter and her past troubles, but some of that felt like an afterthought that didn’t actually impact the story. Tony was another character that I felt was underutilized. So much of the story revolved around Adam that most of the ensemble got lost in the mix. I thought Max and David would play a bigger role, but after their introduction they didn’t serve much of a purpose except that they cooked somewhere in the background. All of these actors worked with what they were given, only showing how lacking the plot was. That’s on screenwriter Steven Knight, not the ensemble.

Though Burnt was bland at times, all the food looked fantastic and the cinematography was slick. As I said before, the montages were used purposefully and with intention. They gave us a peek inside the process of developing menus, perfecting techniques, and building trust in a kitchen. It reminds me of Chef, another food centric film, but lacked energy in comparison. While Burnt felt almost sterile, Chef is vibrant and messy. The sterility felt authentic to the fine dining world at times, though it didn’t always work. The scenes where things get messy, like the first opening night, were too perfect to make me believe that anything was really wrong. That could’ve been an editing choice or a directorial choice, but either way it didn’t add to the story.

Overall, I thought Burnt was a nice Bradley Cooper vehicle, but beyond that it lacked emotional depth. With so many big names attached, including Emma Thompson and what was essentially an extended Uma Thurman cameo, I felt that most actors were underutilized for how good their performances were.

One scene I liked:

I think the Burger King scene is worth mentioning. After Adam meets Helene, he asks her for a lunch meeting at Burger King. He compares the snobbish fine dining food to the humble burger and makes some great connections between traditional French peasant food and modern day fast food. It’s an interesting take on something I never thought about, that people now praise what was once low cooking as fine now. The biggest difference is one was once home cooking and the other is essentially automated and too consistent to be good

I’d give Burnt 4 turbot filets out of 10.