Review: The Menu is delicious, even if it doesn't stick to the bones
Chaotic formal dinners have long been a mainstay of tasteful cinema. In Dinner at Eight (1933), director George Cukor adapted the hit George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber play about an ornate dinner party, and the underlying conflicts that haunt its guests, with poignancy that makes the film a good watch even to this day. Thirty years later, Luis Buñuel presented The Exterminating Angel (‘62) and, ten years after that, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (‘72) — two films that took epicurean social dysfunction to another level with absurdist visions of humans’ alternately combustible savagery and relentless ritualism. And just five years ago, Mike White — currently dazzling audiences with his darkly comedic microcosm of wealth and gender inequality, The White Lotus (2021-present) — gave us Beatriz at Dinner (‘17), a film that encapsulated ongoing sociopolitical tensions between working class Americans of color and affluent white men with crushingly poetic wit.
The Menu is the latest course, so to speak, in this rich tradition, and makes for a delicious new entry. It follows twelve high-brow connoisseurs of consumption — specifically, a zealous young man (Nicholas Hoult) and his rather unfazed partner, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) — who board a boat and allow themselves to be transported to a tiny private island. There, Hawthorne, an exclusive restaurant owned and operated by celebrity chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), is waiting to serve them the meal of a lifetime.
Or, if you will, end of a lifetime.
As it happens, each of these undoubtedly conceited guests has provided Chef Julian with, to his mind, a good enough reason to make a rather literal last call. The only person he holds no grudge against is Margot — a surprise arrival, the one guest that Chef did not anticipate serving. “You shouldn’t be here tonight,” he tells her. But there’s no way off the island. And her date’s too obsessed with his meal to notice that something’s amiss. What is a girl to do?
Margot’s efforts to resolve this quandary while also obeying dining room etiquette make up the better part of the film’s runtime. She’s a fish out of water, but right into the skillet. It’s a great time at the movies if you’ve ever so much as set foot in a restaurant — though obviously, if you have worked as a server or busboy, you’ll resonate all the more with the movie’s blissful takedowns of nightmare guests: obtuse food critics who describe the act of consuming oysters as “eating the ocean…” fratty business guys who ask you for favors and tell you how important they are… overly-enthusiastic foodies who inquire after every ingredient in a given dish, and so on. Seth Reiss’ and Will Tracy’s screenplay is at its best when it positions these trying types squarely in front of Peter Deming’s camera, and director Mark Mylod has a keen eye for capturing inspired flashes from his starry ensemble.
Too bad, then, that it all doesn’t ultimately stick to the bones. The Menu knows the exclusive fine dining world that it’s talking about, yes, and we’re meant to agree that everything that happens within that world is plausible, while allowing for a slight skewing of reality. But the movie’s creators keep pushing at or contradicting that reality until their confection starts to become a bit wobbly.
The trouble with “high-concept,” or easy-but-fun-to-grasp movies is they often ask you to suspend disbelief to the point of idiocy. Hollywood loves to give masterminds and puppet-masters too much credit, and The Menu is no different; the degree to which we are expected to believe that Chef Julian could anticipate all his guests’ reactions and choices over the course of the evening — and then, somehow, not have been able to guess the one choice that upends his ego — is obscene. Or, to use a word that tastes sour in any writer’s mouth, convenient.
It takes great discipline to spin a fanciful idea while also keeping it in hand, consistent with character and basic, real-world laws of probability. Of course, The Menu overtly trades in absurdist themes, but it also doesn’t know how — or, perhaps, is too beholden to some principle of commercialism — to follow these themes to a clear, satisfying conclusion. For instance, I wish they’d gotten a bit more clever with the guests’ deaths: all of the richies go out in one big flambeaus-torch at the very end, but I was hungering for them to be picked off, one by one, throughout the evening, in ways that were consistent with Chef’s specific reasons for having them there.
As someone who doesn’t like to watch gore, I frankly felt that the filmmakers could’ve helped themselves more indulgently to the natural metaphor of “slaughter” that accompanies any story about a farm-to-table eatery.
The idea behind The Menu is good enough to warrant greater intelligence in execution. Yet, thankfully, enough good sense has been exercised to leave us with a jolly, macabre night out — filled with sublime morsels and heartening banter. Buñuel it is not, though I like to think he would’ve had a good time watching it.
