Rodent's Delight
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Rodent's Delight A portrait of the artist as a young rat.' by John Podhqretz Funny, inspired, and visually staggering, Ratatouille is one of the most beautiful films ever made. Everything about it...
...Since this is an animated feature, we'll go along with it...
...Its current chef is more interested in putting the restaurant's name on frozen fast food than he is in cooking...
...At its best, Ratatouille is a portrait of the artist as a young rat—a bracing introduction for its younger viewers to the idea of pursuing and creating excellence...
...The rat runs around throwing ingredients into a huge pot of soup, and the soup proves to be a brilliant success...
...What's interesting is Remy and only Remy...
...After this triumphant debut, Ratatouille has to contrive a way to keep Remy cooking...
...Linguini needs Remy to cook for him, otherwise he'll lose his job...
...Linguini is so useless that Remy even has to maneuver him into the right position to plant a kiss on the kitchen's hard-as-nails sous chef...
...Remy makes a new human friend in Linguini the janitor, the lowest of the low in the kitchen...
...This sequence, which can be viewed online for free, lasts nine minutes, and it's absolutely amazing...
...Watching him being yanked about by the rat in his hat while he howls and complains about it isn't in the least funny...
...The complications continue, and get mind-numbing...
...Remy's rat family shows up and wants him to get them food from the kitchen...
...Remember—no magic is involved and no explanation for this mystical talent is proffered...
...But with Remy stuck in Linguini's toque, the movie loses the indelible charm of the rat's (and Bird's) delightful inventiveness in the soup scene, when Remy has not only to think up good ingredients but also figure out how to dump a carton of creme fraiche into a stewpot when he doesn't have the body mass to lift it by himself...
...Meanwhile, every other element in Rata-touille strives for hyperrealism...
...Endowing a rat not only with the talent to cook but also with the ability to turn a human being into a marionette is one inexplicable endowment too far for this movie...
...Instead, it's about Remy pulling Linguini's hair...
...Ratatouille doesn't get back to its proper subject until the last 15 minutes, when it frees Remy from Linguini's toque and allows him to lead his fellow rats into culinary battle all the way to a rousing and moving finale...
...John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...Remy gets his chance to cook when he finds himself in the kitchen of a once-great, now inert, Paris restaurant...
...Brad Bird has succeeded in designing and executing a scene from a perspective no one before him has ever even attempted, and it's not an exaggeration to say that you sit through the nine minutes with your mouth hanging open in wonder...
...He can read books and understand human speech, and is even able to communicate with people by nods and shrugs and smiles...
...Remy is a French rat who wants to be a French chef...
...This was a primary theme of Bird's previous Pixar movie, The Incredibles—with superheroes struggling to hide their exceptional talents in a world where they get sued more often than they get celebrated...
...One thing you can say about Pixar: This is one company that knows how to end a picture...
...Even though Remy arranges it so that Linguini ends up inheriting the restaurant, Linguini pitches an unbelievable fit because Remy is stealing food from him...
...It doesn't help that Linguini is such an unattractive character: ugly, whiny, stupid, and dull...
...The depiction of the restaurant kitchen is meticulously accurate, and the visual rendition of the City of Light is so precise you are lulled into thinking a rat and a man are having a private moment at night along the banks of the Seine right where Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron danced in An American in Paris...
...And here's where its story begins both to kick in and to fray at the seams...
...Remy can hide under Linguini's toque and move the man's arms and legs as though Linguini were a puppet...
...Writer-director Brad Bird offers no magic spell or other supernatural explanation for Remy's abilities, which are not matched by any other animal in the movie...
...Pixar's last film, Cars, also found itself in its concluding scenes...
...It's off-putting...
...Fine...
...There wasn't a false moment in The Incredibles, a sensational piece of work...
...Everything about it is wonderful—everything, that is, except its mostly tiresome plot...
...This is strangely involuntary," Linguini says...
...There's more than a whiff of Ayn Rand in Brad Bird's worldview...
...This crucial plot point is just . . . weird...
...Linguini turns out to be the love child of the restaurant's now-dead chef...
...Suddenly and conveniently, Remy discovers he can control Linguini's physical movements by pulling this way and that on Linguini's hair...
...None of this is interesting...
Vol. 12 • July 2007 • No. 41
