The Menu (2022)
Movie rating: 7/10
This was a tricky one to review. The Menu is an entertaining film, darkly funny with good performances. Yet its stabs at social commentary are muddled, and by the end it still wasn’t clear exactly what the filmmakers were trying to say. The Menu fits in with other recent films and TV series, from Glass Onion to Triangle of Sadness to The White Lotus, that have offered black comedy, ensemble casts, and “eat-the-rich” satire that skewers the 1%. It’s not surprising that screenwriters are targeting the wealthy at a time of growing inequality and crises on all fronts, when even serious capitalist analysts have lost faith in their own system. But the dominant perspective here is one of nihilism and despair.
The film takes place at Hawthorn, an exclusive island restaurant run by celebrity chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) which is accessible only by boat and caters to wealthy clientele. Margot Mills (Anya Taylor-Joy) is the date of Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), though not on the guest list since Tyler had invited another woman first. Other guests include washed-up actor George Diaz (John Leguizamo) and his assistant Felicity (Aimee Carrero), food critic Lillian Bloom (Janet McTeer) and her editor Ted (Paul Adelstein), wealthy married couple Richard (Reed Birney) and Anne Leibrandt (Judith Light), and business partners Bryce (Rob Yang), Soren (Arturo Castro), and Dave (Mark St. Cyr).
The pomposity and pretension that goes into each dish is matched by that of the chef and his guests. As the diners arrive on the island, they see fishermen harvesting the very scallops that will go into that night’s meal. They visit a “Nordic-style” smokehouse where the meat “of dairy cows only” is being aged to precisely 152 days—no more, no less—to “relax the protein strands.”
Each course is introduced with descriptions that are laughably over the top. Of his first course, “The Island”, Slowik says: “On your plate are plants from around the island, placed on rocks from the shore, covered in barely frozen, filtered seawater which will flavor the dish as it melts.” In her appraisal of the food, Lillian is equally pretentious, making up words like “thalassic”. As she explains to Ted, the food is “oceanic. Thalassa was the primeval spirit of the sea… We’re eating the ocean.”
The second course is when guests first get an inkling that Slowik might be mocking them. Introducing the dish, he says:
Bread has existed in some form for over 12,000 years, especially amongst the poor. Flour and water. What could be simpler? Even today, grain represents 65% of all agriculture. Fruits and vegetables only 6%. Ancient Greek peasants dipped their stale, measly bread in wine for breakfast. And how did Jesus teach us to pray if not to beg for our daily bread?
Beg for our daily bread. It is, and has always been, the food of the common man. But you, my dear guests, are not the common man. And so tonight… you get no bread.
Instead, they get “unaccompanied accompaniments”: a tiny sampling of sauces and condiments with no bread. Some guests wonder if this is a joke. But Tyler, who utterly adores Slowik, is a true believer. Throughout the film, he accepts every new development as further evidence of Slowik’s culinary genius, even as things grow more and more bizarre and unsettling. A sudden act of violence makes clear that “the menu” Slowik has prepared is more frightening than most of his guests could ever have imagined.
Spoilers follow.
Over the course of the night, Slowik reveals knowledge of secrets each guest would rather have kept hidden. He declares that he has invited each guest because they either contributed to him losing his passion for cooking, or because they have taken advantage of the hard work of others, like him and his kitchen staff. Slowik divides those present between workers and “eaters” or “takers”. But everyone there, he says, will die that night.
The film’s anger against the rich makes for some amusing bits, as mentioned above. On the other hand, Slowik, the would-be fighter for the toilers and exploited, is presented fairly consistently as a villain. He orders guests, staff, and even his own investors mutilated or killed. The chef runs his staff like a drill sergeant. None of the kitchen workers have any personality or agency of their own.* They all live on the island with Slowik in glorified barracks, though Slowik has a separate house. The only dialogue we hear from most of the workers is shouting “Yes, chef!” in unison to his questions and commands. They obey all of his orders without question, most notably in the shocking moment when one kitchen worker—whom Slowik says is a “very good” chef, but will never be “excellent”—kills himself in front of all the guests.
In the end, Margot is the only character who survives, purely through her own wits. Everyone else burns.
What I think this film reveals is the mindset of the petty bourgeoisie amid the crisis and decay of capitalism. The petty bourgeoisie does not play an independent class role in society, but is a middle layer caught between the big bourgeoisie—the wealthiest capitalists—and the working class. Historically, they often swing their support from one of these classes to the other. That ambivalence is evident in The Menu. The film attacks the rich as parasites and exploiters. Yet it also depicts workers as mindless drones, easily swayed by a demagogic leader who only leads everyone to death and destruction—or, to borrow a term from Marx and Engels, “the common ruin of the contending classes.” Kitchen staff do not possess initiative and creativity of their own, but merely obey Slowik’s orders. This is a reflection of the petty-bourgeois fear of the working class in the lack of a consistent revolutionary perspective.
The movie is still interesting and worth a watch, but its class perspective undercuts its social commentary and leaves it rudderless. The Menu would have been better, and its satire packed more of a punch, had it written from a firm, revolutionary working-class viewpoint. But of course such a perspective is unlikely so long as wealthy capitalists are the ones who finance the movies, and own and run the studios.
*After this review was published, I remembered the character of Katherine (Christina Brucato), a Hawthorn worker who tells the guests how she rejected Slowik’s advances, and then proceeds to stab him in the thigh. The entire point of the scene is to highlight her agency. So I’ll admit the film does give kitchen staff a bit more agency than I originally suggested.