What's Cooking? (2000)

Gurinder Chadha, the English director of Indian descent who scored a mild success with Bhaji on the Beach several years back, returns with What's Cooking? This time she abandons England and sets her sights on Los Angeles, weaving four separate plot lines and numerous characters into an ambitious portrayal of the Thanksgiving Day ritual from various ethnic points of view. Selected as the opening night film at this year's Sundance Film Festival, What's Cooking? is one of those movies that you're supposed to like: a food-filled, family-centered comedy/drama offering politically correct insights on race and gender. But burdened with a largely uninspired script that serves up stock characters and one too many clichés, What's Cooking? simply doesn't cook at all. Despite all of the mouth-watering meals on display, the film is an exercise in blandness.
What's Cooking? jumps back and forth between four diverse families and their various crises as they prepare, serve up, and consume their respective Thanksgiving feasts. There's a well-to-do African-American couple (Dennis Haysbert and Alfre Woodard) dealing with his set-in-her-ways mother and their rebellious son while entertaining their WASP guests; a Latino family whose matriarch (Mercedes Ruehl) is infuriated when her son invites her estranged, philandering husband; an elderly Jewish couple trying their best to ignore the fact that their lesbian daughter (Kyra Sedgwick) has brought her lover (Julianna Margulies) home for the holiday; and a Vietnamese clan (with Joan Chen as the mother) rocked when they find a condom in their teenage daughter's jacket.

There are certainly plenty of ingredients here for a tasty look at family dynamics. But the conflicts, for the most part, come off as cartoonish. Despite surface similarities to Short Cuts and Magnolia (L.A. setting, multi-character format), there is little of the intensity or depth of those works. It's far closer in spirit to the insipid Soul Food; indeed, it's tempting to label this Soulless Food. A great cast struggles through a tepid script, and the results are as tasteless and unfulfilling as a freeze-dried turkey dinner.