Mostly A Misfire

No Reservations Directed by Scott Hicks

A single shot stands out in Mostly Martha, German director Sandra Nettelbeck’s 2001 film festival hit about a grouchy chef whose spunky young niece and budding coworker teach her to enjoy life. Martha (Martina Gedeck) picks up the phone in a noisy kitchen and learns (though we can’t hear the other end) that her sister has perished in a car crash, leaving her injured daughter stranded in a hospital bed. The camera begins with a close view of Martha’s gradually shocked visage, slowly backing out as the world becomes much too big for her to handle. It’s a chilling moment, elevating the drama to an immediately traumatic plane. In No Reservations, Scott Hicks’ average and fairly pointless reworking of the same story translated to a posh New York setting, the scene goes to Catherine Zeta-Jones, playing the role of Martha as the decidedly more conventionally named Kate. But the moment comes and goes as if the character has been informed of an overdue library fee; rather than an engaging long take and a deep breath, Kate gets the call, widens her eyes in extreme close-up, and we’re out.

Rushed dramatic shortcuts like this one reveal the film’s lack of inspiration and insistence on mundanity. Despite gorgeous photography by Stuart Dryburgh and a predictably stimulating score from Phillip Glass, No Reservations continually suffers from a lack of narrative inventiveness. The role of Kate’s niece falls to prepubescent star Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine, don’t ya know), whose acting career seems to have reached its high point three years ago in Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane, when she was eight. Breslin does a fine job, considering that she has little to do except peer around her aunt’s apartment and reject her fancy dining.

Kate’s muse is jovial charmer Nick (Aaron Eckhart), a sous chef whose unconventional kitchen tactics tick her off for a while until she realizes that he’s cute and charming—as Eckhart tends to be. The backstory provided for Nick, called Mario and played by Sergio Castellitto in Mostly Martha, raises another key point of comparison: In the original movie, Mario was a smooth-talking native Italian, while Nick is a smooth-talking American who spent some time in Italy. Apparently, an innocuous story of international love strains the patience of American audiences, whose tolerance only extends to cultural awareness among their own kind.

But I jest—somewhat. The real issue isn’t Eckhart, whose performance has a few witty moments and gives the slow moving drama an occasional vibrant burst of entertainment. The problem is that Hicks, a more-than-competent director responsible for Shine and Hearts in Atlantis, revives the warmth from the first film and avoids its edginess. Mostly Martha concludes with the arrival of an unexpected father figure for the motherless girl, leaving the romantic fate of the two principal characters, in addition to Martha’s future with her niece, intriguingly ambiguous. No Reservations ties everything together with a neat little bow, demonstrating timidity about the ingredient it needs most of all: reality.