Rat to Riches

A talented rodent makes his name in Brad Bird's Pixar delight.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

THE MOUSE SPECIALl: Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt)whips up an extraordinary omelette. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

An airy souffle, a tangy confection � how many food metaphors will Ratatouille provoke? Set largely behind the swinging doors of a Parisian restaurant, Brad Bird's movie charts the course of a budding chef named Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) from stowaway to culinary artiste. An untutored naïf, Remy comes by his talent naturally, guided by an unerring sense of smell and an innate gift for mixing ingredients. He's a prodigal genius, but unfortunately, he's also a rat.

Pixar loves outcasts and ad hoc communities, and Ratatouille has both. Remy's cultivated tastes make him an outcast in his native colony, where any form of garbage is an acceptable meal, and his pointy nose, hairless tail and reputation for filth (so unfair!) make him unwelcome at Gusteau's, a venerable Paris institution that has fallen on hard times since the death of its portly namesake (Brad Garrett). Remy has grown up on Gusteau's cooking shows (the movie's rats can understand human speech), and drawn sustenance from his motto, "Anyone can cook!" So the excitement of finding himself in front of his idol's atelier is tempered by the knowledge that Gusteau, and his all-embracing ethos, are no more.

These days, Gusteau's kitchen is ruled by Skinner (Sir Ian Holm), a diminutive martinet with a Napoleon complex and matching step stool. Like many a storied eatery, Gusteau's preserves the shell of its former self, feeding tourists shellacked replicas of once-glorious dishes. Only his image survives, plastered on a line of frozen entrees (Gusteau's BBQ Dippin' Ribs and the like). Remy compensates by imagining a Gusteau of his own, a ghostly figure who dispenses advice.

The decline of Gusteau's notwithstanding, Remy is mesmerized by his first glimpse of the kitchen, tracing the rigorous interaction of chef and sous chef, saucier and garbage boy. The last, Linguini (Lou Romano), a gangly klutz with no feeling for the finer points of kitchen artistry, proves Remy's point of entry. By playing Linguini's Cyrano, Remy turns his fumble-fingered protégé into a star, vicariously pleasing the palates of restaurantgoers without flaunting the health code.

Although Remy can understand Linguini, he cannot speak back to him, so the relationship between them is wordless, which allows Bird and the Pixar artisans to indulge in symphonic stretches of physical comedy. His limbs flopping crazily, Linguini is a pixelated Jerry Lewis, narrowly escaping disaster with every step. Ratatouille doesn't have the tactility of the Bird-directed The Incredibles, whose shots of jungle foliage could pass in any live-action feature. But the animation is more supple, both in terms of the characters' articulation and in the many unbroken tracking shots that follow Remy along sewer pipes and through the streets of Paris.

Although Ratatouille is a technical delight, right down to the texture of a freshly chopped red onion, there are times when its story falls surprisingly flat. For all its technical wizardry, Pixar's chief achievement has been at the level of elementary storytelling. There's a level of pure, honest sentiment in Finding Nemo and the Toy Story films that appears virtually nowhere else on the moviemaking landscape � certainly not anywhere studio execs hold sway. Strumming heartstrings rather than lunging at them, they hark back to the collective craftsmanship of Hollywood's heyday.

Bird, by contrast, has taken sole writing credit on his two Pixar films, and they don't seem as finely honed. In Ratatouille, the romance between Linguini and Colette (Janeane Garofalo), the kitchen's only female cook, is limp and uninteresting, largely because the movie's attempt at bad-girl allure (a razor-cut bob, leather pants and a motorbike) feels woefully out-of-date.

Bird also indulges a moralistic streak that seems out of keeping with the movie's lighthearted innocence. Scolding the rats for their scavenging ways, Gusteau tells Remy, "A cook makes. A thief takes," as if stealing food when you're hungry were immoral rather than simply a crime.

The movie's tsk-tsking reaches its peak in its final act, when Remy and Linguini confront Gusteau's nemesis, the evil food critic Anton Ego (Peter O'Toole). Cadaverously thin (evidently, he doesn't like much), the venomous scribe works from a coffin-shaped office and buries restaurateurs with the glee of a child burning ants with a magnifying glass. Lampooning critics is a venerable pastime, one most practitioners have learned to take in stride. But there's a viciousness to Bird's attack which goes beyond satire, and seems odd given than, as far as I can tell, Bird has never made a movie which failed to meet with critical adulation.

At the movie's climax (which, fair warning, I am about to spoil), Ego feasts on Remy's version of ratatouille, a "simple peasant dish" which is so transporting it instantly cracks his disdainful facade. His glowing review follows in voiceover, which, after praising Remy's dishes to the heavens, becomes a critical mea culpa. "The average piece of junk," Ego intones, "is worth more than our criticism deeming it so." Without arguing the merits of that claim, it's worth pointing out that Bird's attack on arrogance reveals an arrogance of its own. The movie's ersatz populism unpeels and discloses a high-handed entitlement. It's not "Anyone can cook"; it's "You'll eat it, and like it."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Ratatouille
Written and directed by Brad Bird
A Buena Vista release