Chefs at elite restaurants are hotheaded narcissists with the patience level of toddlers and the ego of Trumps. This much we know from reality cooking series, from other movies set in restaurant kitchens, from the Gordon Ramsay ethos.
So when we see Bradley Cooper’s Adam Jones, the volcanic antihero of Burnt, grab his (female) sous chef by the collar in a post-prandial breakdown, hurl a string of four-letter invectives at his harried staff, throw an hour’s worth of slightly imperfect dishes against the wall and demand military regimentation from his team of fellow-cooks (“Yes, chef!” is the only answer he’ll accept), we accept that this is the reality of the infernal back-of-the-house life — the sacrifices necessary to assuage the innovative toque and raise the restaurant’s culinary artistry.
Constructive aggression crosses over into other art forms as well: Miles Teller wouldn’t be the best drummer he could possibly be if the psychotic J.K. Simmons weren’t breaking his spirit and throwing chairs across the room, right?
Except that in Whiplash, the fruits of this torment are right there on the screen, in the extraordinary music. Burnt, for all of its food-porny photography, presents little evidence of the actual genius of its tortured genius. We just have to take everybody’s word for it that he’s a god among men, a two-star Michelin maestro on the precipice of a third, a purveyor of gastronomic orgasms. There’s more demonstrable culinary wisdom in Ratatouille, a tastier and more insightful foodie flick in every way.
Burnt, instead, is just another retread of a dated trope: The personally broken, professionally splendiferous Great Man whose immense character flaws are inseparable from his career brilliance. We meet Adam Jones clean and sober and rebuilding his career in London after he’s crashed and burned at a top Paris restaurant, succumbed to drug addiction, alienated his A-list kitchen staff, and even disrupted their own culinary futures. Self-destructive by nature, he can be trusted less with his own finances than with a restaurateur’s largesse: He owes an enormous amount of money to Parisian bookies who darken his new employer’s doors with increasing menace.
As far as a love life, it’s needless to say that his workaholism allows little time for one. He’s a love ’em-and-leave ’em bastard, though as soon as he locks eyes with sous chef Helene (Sienna Miller), whom he’s lured from a rival restaurant, we can already feel his hard heart melting, ever so slightly, like the Gouda in a croque monsieur. You want to bet she falls for him back, discovering the essential goodness hidden under his abusive exterior?
Screenwriter Steven Knight and John Wells, both capable of far better work (i.e. Locke and August: Osage County), never convince us that the good fortune bestowed on their culinary bad boy is justified, yet it greets him around every corner. Tragic developments that would seem to test his mettle are reversed into pots of gold from the heavens of narrative expediency, allowing for “growth” and “reflection” and succinct platitudes like “that kitchen’s the only place where I ever felt like I really belonged.”
The supporting cast absorbs it all like it’s from a pope’s encyclical. He’s the Great Man, after all. If you can’t take the clichés, stay out of his kitchen.
BURNT. Director: John Wells; Cast: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Omar Sy, Daniel Bruhl, Matthew Rhys, Uma Thurman, Emma Thompson; Distributor: The Weinstein Company; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most area theaters