Chef

Jon Favreau’s Chef resonates as a unifying address to the divided American political scene. 

It speaks to the liberal (at least theoretically, Democrat) side as an allegory of the artist who needs to sustain his personal vision and individuality in the face of conformist and capitalist pressures. Carl (Favreau)’s career suicide begins when his boss (Dustin Hoffman) forces him to serve the visiting food critic the conventional menu instead of letting him free his inspiration. The chef’s predicament mirrors Jon Favreau’s dilemma as a film director, torn between making personal statements like this film or Made  and the commercial blockbusters like his Iron Man franchise and the quirkier Cowboys and Aliens. Carl's fumbling with the new social media provides another example of the dangers in a mass address.

The film speaks to the Republican ethos by showing a largely Latin American community working very hard to get ahead in America, exulting in their self-sufficiency, not looking for handouts. There is very little government interference with Carl’s new food truck business. The friendly cop is no lumbering bureaucracy. 
      Carl’s relationship with his ex-wife Inez (Sofia Vergara) makes no sense psychologically or chemically but it encapsulates the country’s ethnic diversity and its historic dependence upon a influx of immigrants. Favreau’s latent Jewishness evokes the first wave of American immigration, Inez’s Cuban glitter the current one. The film’s predominantly Cuban score confirms this celebration, as do the feel-good romantic ending and the sensual delight of the food scenes.

Both the art and the self-sufficient immigrant themes converge in the film’s emphasis on community connection. The chef shouldn’t go off on a personal campaign (Hold the sweetbreads) but has to connect to the audience, his market. So Carl revives his career — and as it happens his first family — by dedicating his food truck to Cuban street cuisine. The promise of Cuban sandwiches mobilizes the reluctant workmen to help the gringo. Moving from posh restaurant to food truck recovers the most elementary principle, preferring hearty folk cuisine over the posh restaurant’s precious designer morsels. When Carl, funded by his ex-enemy critic (Oliver Platt), opens a new posh restaurant at the end it escapes the stigma of his first establishment by keeping his dedication to the people’s cuisine. The miniature of his food truck shows Carl has not forgotten his roots. 
     Of course the key reconnection is familial. Carl’s journey salvages his relationship with his son — and through that Inez. It returns Carl to the freer, sambaing and passionate spirit that presumably first attracted her. She even helps him work the truck. As his waitress girlfriend (Scarlett Johansson) reminded him, he was not happy in his initial situation. Perhaps the corpulent Carl’s fascination with the dancing/singing skeleton, Mister Bonejangles, reveals his sense that he has lost his inner being. That he rediscovers and liberates when he hits the road with his buddy and his son with a populist immigrant menu. The chef recovers his inner cook.