Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love.Francois Duhamel
"Have you ever seen a slice of pizza in a movie that you wanted to eat?" American film critic Elvis Mitchell once asked.
When I think about it, yes, I have. The two slices John Travolta double decks in the opening sequence of Saturday Night Fever 39 years ago still look pretty good to me.
And, unlike in more recent films where food required its own stylist and dressing room – such as in Burnt, Bradley Cooper's gastronomic turn, and both 2010's Eat, Pray, Love or Julie & Julia from 2009, which required Martha Stewart's former food editor to get the meals just right – I doubt there was a stylist on hand primping that greasy Brooklyn pie. Food porn, popularized in those films, comes close to crossing the line from art into artifice.
When gastronomy is cast as a main character, one who identifies as a Thespian with a capital T, it reminds me of an actor such as Anne Hathaway – beautiful to watch, but someone who leaves you craving something more. The difference between food that has meaning and food that's been styled is the level of self-consciousness that makes the latter difficult to embrace on the same level of that slice of pizza.
Mitchell was sounding off about the use of food in Diner, Barry Levinson's 1982 film about a group of friends who reunite in Baltimore for a wedding. Four years ago, he and chef Anthony Bourdain wrote about the movie in the food magazine Lucky Peach. Bourdain's take: "It opened up a whole new world of ways for middle-aged white guys to look back fondly on their fairly uninteresting childhoods."
For me, Diner was like ordering a plate of French fries with gravy – delicious! – only to have them arrive at your table sad, soggy and lukewarm. What's more, I can't remember a single plate of food from the movie. Not that that matters. In film, food has always been secondary to the way that it brings people together: It's not the bite, but what happens in between that counts.
But make up your own mind: Diner is part of the fifth annual Food on Film Festival in Toronto, which pairs movies with personalities from the food world for a lively post-screening discussion.
Cookbook author Naomi Duguid, who hosts this year's festival, says that movie meals are about something else. "Even if there are knives and forks, they're actually taking us out into the world in all kinds of different ways."
Mitchell Davis, food writer and executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation, launched the festival on March 2 with a conversation on The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. He gives the food-porn phenomenon 20 more years. "I don't want to live in a world where everyone is a foodie. I would run away from that – and I'm a foodie!" he said. "I want it to recede a little so that we can enjoy it more, so [food] isn't forced to do things that it's not intended to do."
Think Heartburn, when Meryl Streep intimately shares a bowl of pasta in bed with a new lover, Jack Nicholson; Richard Dreyfuss making a mashed-potato mountain as he loses both his mind and his family in Close Encounters of the Third Kind; four friends in Stand By Me cooking hamburgers over a campfire during a quest that ends up being far more significant than finding a dead body. They are quiet, intimate moments that are far more relatable than the glistening plate of spaghetti al pomodoro that probably took 30 takes to nail before Julia Roberts could consume it in Eat, Pray, Love.
Not only do Davis and Duguid both rank Ang Lee's 1994 film Eat Drink Man Woman at the top of their favourite food films, but they also agree that food operates more effectively on screen when it's not overemphasized. "It's the human interaction that makes things interesting; that makes the story," Duguid says.
"There's only so much you can get out of the food," Davis adds. "It's the same as any object. It's immaterial and inanimate. And believe me, I love food and it's the reason for my being. But you have to be very skillful with it, and quieter is most often better."
Like in The Godfather, when Clemenza shows Michael precisely when to add the sausages and meatballs into the sauce (after the tomatoes, before the red wine). "I'd never before seen a moment in a movie as real as that scene," Mitchell said in Lucky Peach.
Me neither. Another scene, however, which ended up on the cutting-room floor but is included in the bonus-material DVD from the trilogy's box set, resonates with me even more: After Sonny tells his mother that "Pop" has been hurt, she leaves the kitchen to ready herself for a hospital visit. He rips a piece of crusty bread and drags it through a pot of sauce that you suspect has been simmering all day. It is so funny and absurd. And it always breaks my heart because life goes on, but we still need fuel to face it.