The Menu is a quick-footed black comedy about notion and wealth, an investigation of privilege with a triangular energy battle and a beleaguered girl on the heart — ringing Don’t Worry Darling bells. The movie explores the tensions between the servers and the served — not simply how the 1% dwell, however how they exhibit.
Director Mark Mylod has made a reputation directing episodes of Succession, and The Menu trods related floor because the HBO juggernaut. Ralph Fiennes performs the sinister celebrity chef Julian Slowik, who’s presenting a brand new chapter for his restaurant, Hawthorne. The diners attending the ultra-ambitious and comically costly multi-course meal embrace Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who accentuates her leather-based jacket with a gaze completely on the point of eyeroll, and the date who’s dragged her right here, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a sniveling foodie searching for any excuse to say “mouthfeel.”
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The Menu’s actual pleasure lies in its casting, a Clue-like assortment of snobs and phonies who largely deserve no matter’s coming to them. It’s a triumphant gang of character actors: John Leguizamo as a palpably insecure washed-up actor; the all the time spectacular Hong Chau because the prickly {and professional} maître d’; Broad City favourite Arturo Castro as a maladjusted finance bro and budding white-collar legal; Janet McTeer as a meals critic who considers herself chargeable for Julian’s success. As the dinner unfolds, the excellence between diner and menu fogs, and Julian’s resentment towards his monied clientele ramps up into energetic hostility. It’s becoming {that a} jaded artist like Julian has discovered his calling in essentially the most ephemeral medium. Food is life and demise, he reminds us, nevertheless it’s additionally, in the end, shit.
The Menu is what I name a “Yankee Doodle movie”: a film about America directed by a longtime, worldwide director that interrogates American tradition and sophistication as fantasy. Yankee Doodle motion pictures are affected by apparent international signifiers. Here, John Leguizamo’s character says he desires to maneuver from performing to “presenting”; in Widows (2017), Colin Farrell’s accent can’t assist however roll. These motion pictures remind us how America is perceived and commodified — the cherry pie and diner stool aesthetic of Baby Driver (2017), the hardscrabble jail western of The Mustang (2019) — right into a fantasia knowledgeable by the decimated American Dream.
And in The Menu, we get a have a look at American wealth and the way it’s fetishized. The Menu takes place in a single night time in a single distant location. The Hawthorne workers sleep in barrack-like lodging and rise in ant-like unison to have a tendency the island’s natural gardens — it’s a playground not only for Julian, not only for the actors who all get to scene-chew, however for Mylod as a director. He’s constructed a world with its personal algorithm and tradition, the place it’s secure to (typically actually) skewer one-percenters.
Most of the comedy in The Menu is its strawman method to class. Positioned reverse the absurdly narcissistic diners is Margot, who refuses to the touch the ornate meals which get intimate, shiny close-ups. In a extra critical film, a girl pushing meals round on her plate can be clinically troubling, however right here it’s simply meant to symbolize a righteous distaste for frivolity. Caricatures make for good cannon fodder, however for those who’re searching for a real investigation of energy and wealth, The Menu isn’t it. This is earlier than you even get into the in-joke irony of an actor as posh as Fiennes enjoying an all-American working-class slaughterer.
It’s unfair to complain that this shouldn’t be a Boots Riley film, however The Menu pointedly avoids addressing the critiques of the depiction of energy which were levied at thornier motion pictures like 2019’s Parasite, 2020’s Nomadland and this yr’s Triangle of Sadness. Instead, The Menu joins the lengthy record of style motion pictures and sequence made after the towering success of Get Out (2017) that flippantly discover social justice and had been launched by the identical sort of multinational firms they mock. Market analysis signifies the plenty are primed to sneer at billionaires; conglomerates are cashing in.
The Menu’s strawman targets are laughably simple however not less than they’re laughable, which is greater than might be mentioned about many of the dull-witted social horror that goes direct to stream. The Menu shouldn’t be a mirrored image of something consequential — you may nonetheless be hungry for one thing somewhat extra substantial on the finish. But the insanity that unravels is a pleasure to look at and the comedy has actual kick. Like the Hawthorne’s dinner service, it’s actually extra concerning the expertise.
The Menu is now in theaters.
