I loved Ratatouille, the new Pixar film from Brad Bird, as much as so many of the critics did. But there’s one little aspect of it that struck me as, not exactly wrong, but off.
Remy the rat is plainly born with the gift of taste; he apprehends flavors in a way his rat relatives simply can’t, and he is passionate about food from the start.
In the course of the film (I do not believe the following is a significant spoiler) he develops into an extraordinarily talented chef able to please demanding customers and wow the haute-est critics.
In my view, great creators are born and made. To arrive at the top of any field, you have to start with some kind of gift, some genetic bounty. But most stories of achievement — in any field that is both craft and art, which means virtually any field — also involve a phase of learning, of apprenticeship, of buckling down and arriving at mastery through repetition. Shakespeare acted and wrote forgettable stuff like the three parts of Henry VI; The Beatles did their time in the cellars of Hamburg.
But there is something of a lacuna in Ratatouille when it comes to this phase of Remy’s chefly evolution. It’s true that the rat finds a mentor in a deceased chef named Gusteau — and his bestselling tome, Anyone Can Cook. The book seems to serve as Remy’s teacher, and the chef himself becomes a sort of tutelary spirit. But we really don’t see Remy learn or make mistakes. He transforms in a blink from the rat equivalent of a foodie into a world-class chef.
Ratatouille is wonderful. But its shape as an artistic biography (portrait of the culinary artist as a young rat) would have been more graceful had it included episodes showing Remy the journeyman, in transition from gifted amateur to seasoned pro. Instead, Remy’s relationship to his talent is the same as the one the heroes of Bird’s previous movie, The Incredibles, had with their superpowers: The gift is simply a given. There’s no sign of the perspiration behind the inspiration.
[tags]movies, ratatouille[/tags]
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.