The Marvel movies have gotten so popular that there’s probably a whole generation of people who think of Jon Favreau solely as being the director of the first two Iron Man films. People who came of cinematic age during the 90s likely still think of him as the guy who got his break from writing and starring in Swingers, and then going on to do the same for its spiritual successor, Made (while also adding director to his resume), however. Those movies were small budget, character-driven but funny, and they had little in common with big budget studio pictures about men in robot suits. They were good though—especially Made—and his new movie, Chef, sees Favreau going back to his roots and doing something similar. In this one he stars as a once innovative and buzzed-about chef who’s since fallen into a creative rut while working for an unimaginative restaurant owner (Dustin Hoffman) who forces him to stick to a strict menu of yuppy-aimed favorites. Tension and self-loathing build until a bad review causes him to blow up in a very YouTubeable scene that ends in him losing his job and being publicly disgraced. That’s when he hits rock bottom and has to find a way to get his life back on track, which means that we have ourselves a movie.
Chef tells a pretty simple and standard story about a guy with some flaws who needs to overcome them, and it has a resolution you can see coming from a mile away, but it manages to stay a step above your typical flawed-underdog-made-good tale by adding a dose of complexity to its character work. Favreau’s chef learns a lesson or two over the course of the film, but he doesn’t fundamentally change. He picks up a few tricks on how to live his life better and how to be a better father during his journey, but there’s never any indication that he’s got it all figured out now and there won’t be any more bumps in the road ahead. The grayer than black and white character arc also gets paired with a narrative momentum that’s almost completely lacking in urgency, which would sink most films, but spending time with these characters feels like such an authentic experience and the film manages to be consistently funny enough that you don’t ever really mind. Watching Chef is like spending a lazy afternoon in the backyard with good friends.
Despite the slack you’re willing to cut the film for being funny, it does have a couple problems that bog your viewing experience down a little bit though. Chef is at its worst when it’s focusing too much on the nuts and bolts of the growth of the new business venture he gets into after his firing, because sometimes it starts to feel like you’re watching a not so subtle advertisement for Twitter, or, even worse, an explanation of Millenial social culture aimed at people’s grandparents. I know Favreau isn’t exactly the young guy mining the latest youth culture trends for material like he was when Swingers was made, but the lengths that this movie goes to in order to explain what social media is to the viewer are pretty embarrassing, and sitting through all of the exposition gets kind of tedious. He’s lucky that the cast he’s put together (including John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Scarlett Johansson, Sofia Vergara, and impressive child actor Emjay Anthony) is so good and the script he’s written is so solid that we can forgive him a bit for sounding like a lame dad who’s just become hip to a trend from five years ago.
Hopefully there’s going to be more independent filmmaking in Favreau’s future, but hopefully the stories he tells in his movies from now on will have less to do with old people trying to figure out how to use smartphones.
