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Ratatouille
Past brilliant, on to stupefying
2007
Review: July 13, 2007
Director: Brad Bird
Starring: Patton Oswalt, Lou Romano, Peter O'Toole, Brad Garrett, Janeane Garofalo
Highly advised.
THE SETUP:
Rat gets job in kitchen.
DISCUSSION:
Having followed Pixar since before they made features, of course I was going to see this, although the initial previews did not really draw me in and the whole concept wasn’t an easy sell—and not because I’m disgusted by rats in kitchens. But then the New York Times called it “a near-flawless work of popular art,” and that sparked my interest further. Now I have seen it twice within a week—and liked it even more the second time.
Before the feature we have a short film called Lifted, which concerns a spaceship levitating a person out of his bed. I was amused at first by the obvious homage/parody of Close Encounters, but it also seems to be the first Pixar cartoon that is fairly sadistic, and I wasn’t really much into it or its characters.
Then the feature. We join our hero, Remy, being thrown out of a house, then track back to learn his story. He is a rat with a highly-developed sense of smell and taste. This sets him apart from his rat relatives, who are content to eat anything. Remy also walks upright, because he says he doesn’t want to eat with the paws he walks on. He also reads. All of which causes his slacker pudgeball brother to ask “Does Dad know?” Because reading and caring about food and cleanliness can only be conceived of as snooty, and a further affront to his parents and upbringing. A friend who I went with the second time later told me that I’m “a fool” for not recognizing the entire movie as a gay parable—because it’s about a rat who knows he’s different and believes that there is a better way than what his parents know and appreciates reading and art and culture, and knows that he must move to the city. And yeah, I do think that this mirrors the experience of a great many gay kids—including me, whose parents were very, very concerned that I read too many books—I think the whole movie is really just about being a smart, sensitive, artistic child, and how alienating that can be from parents who are essentially frightened by you.
There’s this whole madcap chase, bringing up fears that the whole thing may end up too frenetic—a weakness of some of the Pixar films, not to mention all other contemporary children’s films—but soon it settles down and develops a nice rhythm. Remy and his family end up in a sewer [this is getting to be an alarmingly common plot device] and separated. Remy waits for his parents to show [he apparently does not look for them], when he starts having hallucinations about Gusteau, his culinary hero, a sort of French Julia Child whose motto is “anyone can cook.” Rather surprisingly for a family-oriented film, Gusteau, who is explicitly identified on several occasions as a figment of Remy’s imagination, prods him to forget about finding his family for the moment and go up to look around. Gusteau later pushes Remy toward cooking, “leads” him to the restaurant, and encourages him to use the soon-to-be-introduced Linguini as his cooking tool, and during all this it can be easy to forget that it is in fact Remy encouraging himself. In Gusteau he has externalized a part of his mind which can encourage him to do the things he wants to do, but would not allow himself permission to do with “external” encouragement. Gusteau also later scolds Remy for various infractions. Anyway, Remy goes up and discovers that he is in Paris, and right by Gusteau’s [who is dead, btw] restaurant.
So the deal is that Remy befriends Linguini, this good-natured but untalented guy, and uses him as a puppet through which to cook. There is much other complication, including a romance with co-worker Colette, and a snobby food critic named Anton Ego and voiced hilariously by Peter O’Toole, but I’m going to leave most of the plot for you to discover on your own.
While this may not be my favorite Pixar film, it is by far their most accomplished. The story is richer and more wide-ranging than anything they’ve attempted before, sprawling across several subplots that initially seem disparate but are expertly woven by the end. There was a little too much slapstick with Linguini flopping all over the place, but this is a minor quibble.
The animation has gone past stunning and on to stupefying. Everything looks great, of course, but every so often you will spot a particular something that just makes your jaw drop. A few such stunners are water droplets on a country stream, a piece of baguette Remy momentarily holds, rainwater on Parisian cobblestones, the sheen of the metal cooler door, a splosh of spilled wine…. This is also the first extensive animation of humans in a Pixar film, and their expressions and mannerisms come off wonderfully. One of the strange frissons of the computer-animated film is the surreality of having such fanciful things happening in a near-photorealistic image, and that fizzy dislocation is certainly in place here.
The complex character arcs are handled with extreme delicacy, with Remy’s reconciliation with his family [mother rat is strangely absent and never mentioned] handled in a convincing and not cloying way. The relationship with Colette also comes off as very organic and unforced, and the other, smaller characters all manage to leave distinct impressions. There is a moment toward the end with Anton Ego that I wouldn’t dare spoil for you, but that borrows heavily from Proust and absolutely brought the house down both times I saw it.
If you don’t see this film you are a fool. And if you don’t see it in the theater… you have made a mistake. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this were the first animated film to win Best Picture. Go now.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Yes, this is a work of art.
