“No Reservations” may be a food movie, but it sure is bland. Which is worse than bad. At least a truly bad piece takes a chance to have some kind of flavor — even if it may be bitteror offensive.
Cinema’s most delicious victual ventures like “Babette’s Feast,” “Eat Drink Man Woman,” “Big Night,” or even this summer’s adorable cartoon “Ratatouille” exalt the ritual of meal preparation as mouth-watering metaphor for the passion and pain that is life. You can almost taste the heavenly-looking grub; your heart melts like fine chocolate in a double-boiler for the characters. But today’s melange of family tearjerker and romantic comedy, starring a miscast Catherine Zeta-Jones as protagonist, fails to stir up as compelling narrative and as culinary temptation.
Like the picture, her performance is — if you’ll pardon the expression — neither feast nor foul.
The still beautiful if now mature Welsh brunette has trouble even consistently hiding her native accent, much less finding the right tonal balance of this genre-defying dramedy. She plays the persnickety American executive chef of a chi-chi Greenwich Village bistro. But despite her cool obsessive-compulsive nature, Kate Armstrong will soon find love and personal growth via her just-orphaned niece Zoe (Abigail Breslin) and her garish but hunky new sous chef Nick (Aaron Eckhart in a thankless boyfriend role).
As directed by Scott Hicks (“Shine”), a remake of Sandra Nettelbeck’s 2001 German language film “Bella Martha” (shown in the United States as “Mostly Martha”), the opposites-attract, lovey-dovey bits lack sufficient spark and wit. Meanwhile, the supposedly heartbreaking/heartwarming, foster mother-in-training main plotline plays corny — even though the former Little Miss Sunshine, Breslin, again proves to be able beyond her years at fashioning a whole sympathetic child character.
She’s not just the youngest but also the best actor here. As her depressed Zoe grieves for her recently deceased mother and faces the unsettling prospect of her ill-equipped Aunt Kate as her guardian, scenes of the waif’s neurotic coping peculiarities are more amusing than anything the adults are doing. It is mostly in select moments with Breslin that “No Reservations” cooks. But that’s not enough to make it worth more than a DVD rental or pay-cable diversion on a rainy day in a few months.
‘No Reservations’
**
Starring: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Abigail Breslin, Aaron Eckhart
Director: Scott Hick
Running time: 93 minutes
Rated PG for some sensuality and language
