By Curt Schleier
NO RESERVATIONS is a perfect summer date movie. For one thing, it’s mindless—and I mean that in the best sense of the word. You won’t need a roadmap to figure out how to get to the end of this picture. But that’s never the point of these chick flicks. What’s important here is the scenery en route to the destination – the destination of course being happily ever after. And the scenery here is, appropriately, picturesque.
Master chef Kate Armstrong (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is talented, insecure and very uptight. She’s in charge of the kitchen in a high-tone Greenwich Village restaurant, and hasn’t had a relationship in three years.
Kate’s well ordered life is thrown for a loop when her sister, coming to visit, is involved in a fatal automobile accident. She is survived only by her elementary school age daughter, Zoë (Abigail Breslin). Armstrong takes the young girl in, but doesn’t know how to fit Zoë into her rigidly regimented existence.
NO RESERVATIONS is based on a 2001 French film BELLA MARTHA (or MOSTLY MARTHA), but its roots go back much further. There have been numerous films in this baby-interrupts-life genre; one of my favorites was BABY BOOM, the 1987 romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton as a high-powered business executive who is left holding the (diaper) bag when a distant relative passes away leaving an infant with no one but Keaton’s character, J.C. Wiatt, to take the child in.
In NO RESERVATIONS, Kate’s life is further complicated when the restaurant’s owner, Paula (Patricia Clarkson), hires a sous chef, Nick (Aaron Eckhart). Nick is everything Kate isn’t: a free spirit, who sings opera the kitchen and likes to make people laugh, which infuriates Kate.
He’s able to connect with young Zoë, something Kate hasn’t been able to do, adding to her anxiety. Of course it has to end badly.
Zoë runs into the street in front of a taxi and one evening when Nick puts too much salt into a soup, Kate guts with a carving
knife. Come on. You didn’t believe that, did you? You don’t gut a human with a carving knife. You use a fillet knife.
In any event, it is Zoë who brings Kate and Nick together in a fairy tale ending. Okay, be cynical. But the trip was fun. This has been a B&B kind of movie season — that is blockbusters or just plain busts. Attempts at light hearted romantic fare — witness
LICENSE TO WED — were mostly miserable failures. (The one exception:
KNOCKED UP.)
NO RESEVATIONS, by contrast, succeeds on a number of levels. Zeta-Jones and Eckhart seem to have a genuine chemistry. Breslin, last seen in her Oscar-nominated performance in Little Miss Sunshine, is extraordinary.
One word of advice. Eat before the movie. The dishes prepared on film will make your mouth water even more if you’re hungry. And you don’t want to watch a movie while there’s dribble coming out of the corner of your mouth.