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Reviews

Book Review: The Secret Life of Pronouns by James W. Pennebaker

My review for Rappahannock Magazine

What’s in a word? Apparently (or maybe not so), a lot argues Dr. James W. Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, in his book The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us. Pennebaker is a psychologist—as such, he is not interested in the study of language for its own sake but rather in how language gives us an insight into our psychological states. While discourse analysis presently seems to be the realm of communications scholars and anthropologists, Pennebaker breaks with that pattern and offers a rather unique and lively take on a research method that has been used far too long to be novel per se. The Secret Life of Pronouns reads like a sleuth piece (all the more amusing that his research assistant is named Sherlock Campbell)—it wryly reads in a “bet you didn’t expect this” way, all the more so because the book is focused on function words, which lack the pizazz of style words. “Style” or “function” words, along with pronouns, include articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs and conjunctions — all of the connective tissue of language. The nuts and bolts, if you will. People are reasonably good at picking up on “content words”: nouns, action verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. “Function words are almost impossible to hear,” Pennebaker explains, “and your stereotypes about how they work may well be wrong.” These sneaky lexicon bytes offer an interesting look at our individual psyche and identity, the book demonstrates. Pennebaker and his team created a computer program named LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). His initial interest was in the use of function words, particularly pronouns, as an indicator of improved mental health. Recovery from trauma seemed to require a kind of “perspective switching” that shifts in pronoun use could indicate. The Secret Life of Pronouns is rife with curious discoveries—for example, Pennebaker reveals that Secretary of State John Kerry’s advisers made that mistake during the 2004 presidential race in encouraging him to use “we” more often so as to appear more personable. Kerry was already using “we” too much and unlike with every day people, “When politicians use them, we words sound cold, rigid and emotionally distant.” Or the book opines on why some cultures drop personal pronouns and others don’t (for example, in Spanish, Yo estoy triste vs. estoy triste)—maybe because more tightly knit collectivist cultures tend to drop pronouns, whereas individualist cultures keep them. In the chapter on analysis of poets’ work, Pennebaker discovers that the chairwoman of the “Depressed Poets Society,” Sylvia Plath, uses a lot more “I” words in her poetry, as though taking us closer to the edge of her personal melancholia. The book also uncovers the strong effects that factors such as gender, age, and class have on our language. Women use “I” words a lot more than men and they use cognitive words and social words at much higher rates as well. “The person who uses fewer I-words is the person who is higher in the social hierarchy”—in other words, when people converse with higher-ups, they felt diminished and compensated for that by focusing on their agency. Women, younger people, and people from lower social classes more frequently use pronouns and auxiliary verbs. Lacking power, he argues, requires a deeper engagement with the thoughts of one’s fellow humans. Pennebaker even discusses “language style matching,” which should pique the curiosity of most online dating hackers out there! The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us is incredibly comprehensive in scope, yet written in an accessible, charming way that will make an armchair psychologist out of you. This is not the stuff of stodgy discourse analysis your college professor may or may not have purveyed. Pennebaker also explores how writing can be used to improve mental health. Three aspects of emotional writing are associated with improvements in people’s physical and mental health: 1) accentuating the positive parts of an upheaval, 2) acknowledging the negative parts, and 3) constructing a story over the days of writing. Also, the more people changed in their use of first-person singular pronouns (e.g., I, me, my) compared with other pronouns (e.g., we, you, she, they), the better their health became, again illustrating that an internal focus is not necessarily a bad thing for depression; the flip side of anger turned inward is the “I am capable” more agency-driven aspect. The book will truly leave you dazzled by computational linguistics (yes, dazzled)! For example, Pennebaker’s work proves that lying shows rather clearly in people’s words, and that Paul McCartney proved to be a more creative writer than John Lennon. McCartney’s lyrics were far more flexible and varied both in terms of writing style and content than John Lennon’s.

Reporting

Expert Panel Shines Light on ISIS

Two months after President Obama launched air strikes in an effort to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the militant group known as Islamic State or ISIS, the operation now has a name—”Enduring Resolve”—a reference to the long, difficult task of combating such an amorphous organization.

In an October event at the School of International Service convened by Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence, David Gregory, Ambassador Akbar Ahmed of SIS, Politico’s Susan Glasser, and The Washington Post’s David Ignatius discussed the prospects for the American-led campaign against ISIS and broader U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Moderator David Gregory began the talk by posing the question about how well the war on IS is going.

“It’s going badly. Wars often start badly,” explained Ignatius, reaffirming the need for the U.S. to form a strong coalition with other Arab nations. “Basically, we would have to tell them, ‘You have to put some skin in the game if you want the American help.’”

David Ignatius CSIS Panel

He also suggested that training CIA-style guerilla fighters in Syria to combat IS might be a more appropriate style campaign than the air bombing one used thus far. Ignatius expressed concern about “whether we are walking into a trap that locks us into the kind of warfare our adversaries want and how can we mitigate that danger.” He was of the firm conviction that Iraq is “as sectarian as ever. It is badly fractured and I do not see a coherent strategy in our policy to pull it together.”

Ambassador Akbar Ahmed framed ISIS in a tribal Islamic context, a topic he wrote a book about: “ISIS has very little to do with Islam. Its members are tribesmen from tribes that have imploded over the last few decades. We all tend to think of this as radical Islam without considering this is tribal Islam which espouses a code that encourages revenge for wrong-doings.”

Akbar Ahmed Chatham House 2013

One major distinction he made, however, is that this code has become mutated. Out of the trifecta of bravery, courage, and revenge, revenge is seen as the only thing left. He underlined that the creation of borders that split the tribes in forced ways, fanning the flames of conflict. That conflict is not Islam vs. the West but periphery versus center—societies left on the fringes fighting a central government they perceive as antagonistic to their interests.

Ambassador Ahmed explained that tribal Islam is a militaristic culture and one that is constantly in conflict with Islam itself—for example, tribal Islam eschews the inroads made for women by Islam, such as inheritance rights. “We need to understand the context of these movements and not call them Islamic movements.” In couching the conflict in center vs. periphery, Ahmed also suggested that public opinion in Pakistan, for example, is in favor of strikes against ISIS, whereas public confidence in Iraq has collapsed. He believes that Muslims worldwide support the fight against ISIS and that getting the support of the people is important in forming an alliance.

Susan Glasser Politico New America Foundation

Susan Glasser spoke a bit more on the policy side of the issue, calling Obama an “extremely reluctant warrior.” “We are seeing a fairly public debate between the President and the generals on strategy. We have a lot of generals saying the war plan will not work, that it is based on false theory, premised on the notion that an air campaign on guys in pick-up trucks.”

All three panelists expressed the opinion that ISIS is an aggressive, flexible, and adapting enemy and that there is tremendous trepidation about entering into yet another quagmire of conflict in the Middle East.

David Ignatius discussed some of ISIS’ tactics, referring to the beheading of people as “their version of shock and awe. The element of raw physical intimidation, of an almost pornographic  level of violence, is what is so attention-grabbing.” But he referred to the case of Al Qaeda that had grown so hated because it made so many enemies in fighting a sectarian battle against more than the U.S. “It is not possible to brutalize your way to success.” He explained that ISIS is able to gain wealth by engaging in kidnapping, selling oil, and taking over central bank branches. They also have clever strategies for gaining recruits. In addition to a powerful social media empire, they have the practice of attacking prisons, specifically in Mosul and Ambar, whereupon liberating several thousand prisoners, they gain new fighters from that cadre. “They are really smart in how they plan operations.”

Watch the entire video here.

 

Reporting, Reviews

E-Team Film Review

My review of the film E-Team

E-Team, co-directed by Katy Chevigny and Ross Kauffman, is an immersive look into the work of Human Rights Watch’s Emergency Team, a group of people that travel to war-torn countries, document human rights abuses world-wide, and then draw media and government attention to those crimes.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the film is in its insider look at exactly how this sort of work takes place, the perils involved, and the authenticity and rigor expected. More specifically, the team is careful to get thorough (multiple) eyewitness accounts, which preempt questions about the veracity of the reports produced by Human Rights Watch. We meet Anna Neistat and Ole Solvang, a husband-and-wife team, who are literally on the ground as bombs are going off around them in Syria. The viewer gets a keen sense that this is not the fare of an armchair philosopher IR wonk; Anna and Ole do not wait until “conditions are safe” to make their way to the conflict areas.

The film’s portrayal of the civil war in Syria is especially poignant. They smuggle themselves across the Turkey-Syria border in 2013 by literally running across a barbed wire fence. There, they take the testimony of frightened Syrian villagers who huddle with them in an apartment rattled by the explosions outside. The sense of terror is palpable, and the feeling of death ever present. In one of the most moving scenes in the film, a mother who has just lost three of her sons, says, “What is the point of talking?” as she cries. E-Team convinces us that even in the incredibly cynical world of politics, the stories of the people suffering – trapped in a situation beyond their control – have incredibly gravity and that suffering should not go unnoticed just because it is so rampant.

We also meet the E-Team’s other members: Peter Bouckaert, a weapons specialist, and Fred Abrahams, the “father” of the group. Abrahams testified against Slobodan Milosevic at the Yugoslav Tribunal, recounting the atrocities he encountered in Albania. Abrahams’ testimony against the smirking Milosevic is an illustration of what happens when the heartbreakingly human meets with the glib heartlessness of the political. The team’s work aims to simply give voice to those who were forever silenced, to shine light on the hidden.

E-Team, despite its very political matter, stays clear of pontificating asides. In fact, one gets the sense that the kind of work Human Rights Watch does is very much the kind of work that journalists should be doing: documenting stories, gathering accounts of various witnesses, and speaking on issues of concern to all of us as humans. Yet, they seem to be able to do more than journalists can. For example, it is their report on the Assad’s regime use of chemical weapons that spurs UN Security Council action on the issues and negates the rebels being blamed for the attack.

The team also visits Libya to document survivors’ accounts of Gaddafi’s attacks on civilians and protesters in 2011. Here we see how the knowledge of weapons experts like Peter is used to pinpoint who fired what weapons, when, and how. In other words, the film does a great job of illustrating the breadth and veracity of HRW’s reports and the extensive knowledge of the people compiling those reports. The organization’s mission, in its own words, is not necessarily to effect policy change per se but rather to document abuses and alert us to them. Despite the harrowing and dangerous nature of their work, the team members come across as atypically down-to-earth and not even a little bit self-righteous or arrogant. The adrenaline junkie zealot stereotype is not to be found here.

E-Team benefits from incredibly tight editing and crisp cinematography that belies the guerrilla-style film-making usually associated with this genre. The engrossing storyline and behind-the-scenes look at human rights work gives the viewer a lot to appreciate.

Reviews

Time Is Illmatic Film Review

My review of the documentary Time Is Illmatic

“My poetry’s deep; I never fail.”

Twenty years after the release of Nas’ seminal debut album Illmatic, Time Is Illmatic offers us a peek behind the curtains of its creation. Unlike other documentaries of its ilk, this is not the standard fare of the “let’s cram as many famous people as possible to sing paeans to the artistic genius” oeuvre. In his feature directing debut, the former graffiti artist One9 directs this not like a wide-eyed fan boy eager to deify Nas but like a museum curator, looking to recreate a piece of history all hip-hop fans, regardless of their position on Nas, would be curious about. Nas describes Illmatic as a record whose intent was “to make you feel that hip-hop is changing, becoming more real.” He wanted to offer a cinematic look into Queensbridge, New York, of the 1990s. Whether Illmatic is *the* hip-hop record of all time is an irrelevant question; few records have come along that have clearly changed the trajectory of their genres and left an indelible mark, regardless of whether they were the first to do so or the best to do so. Illmatic to hip hop is what DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing is to turntablism.
Time Is Illmatic does not require that its audience pay homage at the feet of hip hop royalty and instead offers a hushed-breath-reverance-free look at the making of one of the important records in hip-hop history.Time Is Illmatic starts with a look at Nas’ upbringing, which had a momentous impact on his career as an emcee. His father, jazz musician Olu Dara and his mother, Ann Jones, raised Nas and his younger brother Jabari, a.k.a. Jungle, in an Afro-centric cocoon of art, books, and music quite divergent from the typical Queensbridge household. Nas himself explains that he did not grow up in need. He eloquently speaks about the impact that his father’s library and worldly orientation had on his rhyming; even his name was a reminder to take pride in his roots (“Nasir. That’s the name of a king!”). His mother nurtured him and taught him to work hard. Even though Nas’ father is often cited as the more artistically influential part of his life, Jungle identifies their mother as the anchor and protector.

Time Is Illmatic does not rely on pundits to analyze the social circumstances Illmatic was borne out of, save for a short cameo by Cornel West who discusses the origin of the projects and why so many African-Americans were forced to live in them. But it nevertheless paints a vivid picture of the milieu. For example, Olu Dara describes enrolling Nas into school as “enrolling him into hell. This was not a nurturing school system.” Their father encourages both Nas and Jungle to drop out of school after the eighth grade, despite protests from their mother, because he wants them to follow their entrepreneurial dreams and be men rather than boys. Nas and his upstairs neighbor Will Young, aka Ill Will, start making music in a serious way in between intense bouts of “baking brownies and taping videos” (how’s that for a hip-hop confession!). The hip-hop scene at the time is fresh, colorful, rich.
Fans of old-school hip-hop will also revel in the film’s coverage of the neighborhood rivalries and MC battles on tracks like Marly Marl and MC Shan’s “The Bridge” and KRS-One’s “South Bronx.”Featuring interviews with Illmatic producers Large Professor, Pete Rock, L.E.S., and DJ Premier, Time Is Illmatic certainly knows how to create the setting in an organic way. They bring to life Queensbridge in 1994 and paint a vivid picture of the “N.Y. state of mind.” Hip-hop has always had a close relationship with space and Illmatic is well-established in that pantheon. Illmatic is a look inside a neighborhood ravaged by crack and violence, one where “any and everybody made money by crack or was impacted by it.” Time Is Illmatic is the story of the Queensbridge projects as much as it is the story of Nas. He reflects emotionally on the personal losses he has suffered and on how most of the people from back in the day are either dead or in jail. Q-Tip also makes an appearance, in which he reflects on the poignancy of “One Love,” which takes the form of a letter to a friend in prison: “Congratulations, you know you got a son. I heard he looks like ya, why don’t your lady write ya?” Nas’ dissection of what the system of incarceration does to a community – the damage it inflicts on families and not just the person in jail – is trenchant.
Time Is Illmatic lovingly and honestly chronicles the making of an album that would influence many generations after its release. Like Olu Dara’s jazz staccatos, it has a clipped, vintagy, Wild Style-esque ethos that has an authentically poetic cadence. By allowing Nas and his family to narrate, it offers a richness that could not have been unearthed in any other way.

Reviews

Book Review: The Other Language by Francesca Marciano

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My book review of The Other Language by Francesca Marciano


Francesca Marciano’s The Other Language is essentially the literary and literal antithesis of Eat, Pray, Love—it upends the insufferable, Oprah-sanctified-and-sanctimonious trope of a privileged white woman who travels to exotic locales to “find herself” and replaces it with something all the more magical in its realism. The acclaimed author of Rules of the Wild gives us nine stories that conjure emotions and places with the kind of natural story-telling that eschews cheap grabs for our emotional investment, reliant on lachrymose and saccharine writing, and instead explore the truism that “home is really where they love you.” The vibrant characters in The Other Language travel across the globe, but the territory covered is far wider than merely geographical. The book is a beautifully-written testament to the absurdity of ideas like “finding yourself,” whether it be through travel, escapism, or intervention. The natural fluency and virtuosity of Marciano’s writing will take you on an engrossing journey and speak to you in a language you can viscerally understand.

In the title story, “The Other Language,” Emma is a 12-year-old girl who has recently lost her mother. She travels with her father and brother and sister from Italy to a summer vacation in a sleepy Greek village. The story presents the reader with one of the most trenchant and genuine examinations of death and how it thrusts those left behind into a social limelight that makes their personal pain all the more difficult. “The adults had decided they were too small to be told such dreadful particulars, as if their mother’s death was just another protocol they had to observe, like never ask for a soft drink unless they were offered one and never fish inside a lady’s handbag…They assumed death must be an impolite subject to bring up in conversation, a disgrace to be hidden, to be put behind.” To “survive the pain buried inside her was to become an entirely different person.”
On the Greek island, Emma develops a crush on an English boy…and of course, she must learn to speak English to communicate with him. Marciano’s touching description of Emma’s language teacher—Joni Mitchell, singing songs about “the wind is in from Africa,” is such a vivid picture of how people often learn a new language. Emma, “didn’t know what she was getting away from, but the other language was the boat she fled on.” “The Other Language” elegantly captures the indelible mark adolescence often leaves on our lives. Emma’s fascination with English causes her to move to America, where she “made sure to pick up every mannerism and colloquial expression that might polish her new identity.” The bitter-sweet melancholy and wistfulness one experiences when looking back is profoundly conveyed by Marciano’s writing.
The other stories in the book also share this theme of a seeming schism, unraveling, separation, followed by the discovery of something that perhaps was there all along. In, “Chanel,” which sort of recalled O’Henry’s “The Gift of the Three Magi,” for me, a woman buys a Chanel dress she cannot possibly afford. Eventually, she cannot possibly afford to part with this dress she has never worn, yet has now transformed into a talisman of sorts, one harkening to past “glories,” now long-gone. The dress is a reminder that finding out what is glorious simply requires a change of viewpoint. In “Big Island Small Island,” a man has escaped to an island off the coast of Tanzania. Marciano’s description of him as a “beached hippie” is incredibly humorous and apropos. Beached whale; beached hippie; beached human…all the same, in essence.
In another one of my favorite stories in the book, “The Presence of Men” is about the friendship between an extraordinary local seamstress and a divorced woman named Lara who escapes to a small Italian village after her divorce. Her past life keeps tearing at the seams of her new one, with everyone wondering what Lara is running away from, blaming it on all on some kind of a midlife, post-divorce crisis. Until she sheds the vestiges and togs of her past, everything else is only so much curtains…and obfuscation. Of course, there is yoga involved, too. But only in an incredibly hilarious way—Lara, a former yoga teacher, has the proverbial awakening that yoga is not about doing poses that give you a swollen knee (literally, in this case) and about forcing ideas about “living in the present” on yourself. Yoga happens when one isn’t paying attention to yoga. Yoga is realizing that you are not really trying to do anything with yourself.
The Other Languageexplores romantic relationships in a (mercifully) histrionic-less and melodramatic-free way (in case you are wondering why Oprah did not pick this book to sing paeans to instead of Eat, Pray, Love). The characters are all due for some big realizations; the locations are incidental to their process of disentangling. In “An Indian Soiree,” a husband and a wife decide to end their marriage, perhaps all too easily. Nothing catastrophic happens—apparently, they just choose to. “They had to say things to each other that would make turning back impossible and they obliged…How odiously clichéd it all sounded, and yet—at that very moment—so utterly real and satisfying.”
The stories are all of reinvention, but not the kind of clichéd, spoon-fed reinvention that comes seemingly all-too-readily in books like Eat, Pray, Love. Yes, the characters might be in exotic locales, but the locales are not the self-realization catalysts. “After seven years of European life, she found herself smiling at the predicament she’d found herself in. It was a reminder that there were still places in the world where one could vanish, be lost, be found and rescued by strangers.” The reinvention often comes only by seeing things that were already there—in that sense, this book will not give you “why am I not traveling” complex. You don’t need to incinerate all vestiges of your “comfortable” life to travel far, as long as you can do that some of that traveling sitting at home, it suggests.
Marciano is not in the business of cheaply tugging at the heartstrings, but her deceptively simple and evocative prose will do that effortlessly and pull you along on a tour-de-force journey rich with sensory details like, “the pots of basil on the windowsills to keep the mosquitoes away.”



Reporting

News Stories for American University’s School of International Service

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Internship Awards Allow Students to Broaden Their Horizons
Professor’s Book Examines Terror Authorization Act
Professor Investigates Conflict and Stabilization in Afghanistan

Reporting, Reviews

The Kill Team Review

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My review of the documentary The Kill Team

Director Dan Krauss’ The Kill Team is an absolutely enthralling tour-de-force documentary that stares unblinkingly down the ugly, dirty face of war, offering a sobering look at its specters. There are no heroes to be found here, only the very banality of extreme violence. As Specialist Adam Winfield says, “There are no good men left here.”
The Kill Team is the story of a platoon that made headlines in 2010 after it was discovered that 5 soldiers in the group had essentially murdered 3 innocent Afghani civilians “for sport.” The film focuses on Specialist Adam Winfield who had attempted to alert authorities to the “kills” taking place, only to himself be charged by the Army and face a lengthy prison sentence. The absurd dichotomy of someone being labeled a whistle blower and a murderer in the same breath lies at the crux of The Kill Team’s main argument: the military can be a ruthless machine that often victimizes its own, not just the enemy.

film3-TheKillTeam

The main story line of the film is Winfield’s court battle, but all of the other people involved in the murders are also interviewed, except for the mastermind and leader of the unit, Sergeant Gibbs. Spc. Jeremy Morlock’s seemingly emotionless account of how “we straight murdered that dude,” is chilling if taken merely as a sign of his apathy to violence. Looking behind the mask, we get the idea that the macho culture of the army he has been reared in has taught him to suppress feelings.  He frequently references “the ideology of the infantry world,” this idea that life in the Army was supposed to be some kind of a glorified Top Gun-esque escapade of patriotism and heroism, which by default involves the killing of the enemy. It’s certainly a novel perspective: all too often we are led to believe that the people who enlist actually seek to avoid combat. Morlock belies that stereotype — he describes an entire platoon of thirty-some men that idolized Sergeant Gibbs, who asked him to help them get “kills” as well. Gibbs’ collecting of finger bones for a grisly war trophy necklace does not strike them, seemingly, as wrong.
The Kill Team offers a scathing – though unstated – condemnation of the Army who essentially made a scapegoat out of Winfield, who had all along attempted to alert the higher-ups, labeling him not enough of a conscious objector. Winfield brings up a salient point: “We tend to handle things in-house. Had I reported it, it would have come right back down the chain-of-command to me.” As his lawyer points out, the military justice system is not impartial: they are essentially the judge and the jury. Furthermore, the film puts into question just how rogue of a platoon was this or was their conduct commonplace, as the soldiers suggest and an issue only because they were caught. The chilling concept of a “drop weapon” is introduced. It is a weapon that is off-the-books and can be “dropped” on anyone, making him/her appear as an aggressor and justifying any violence committed against him/her. Gibbs apparently had access to a whole cache of this kind, including grenades and AK47s. The film raises the interesting question of why uphold the seemingly legality of a war when the very concept of it implies a level of chaos and violence that renders such track-covering pathetic in the true sense of the word.
There is little question about Sergeant Gibbs motivations—he calls the Afghanis “savages.” But what about the other members of the platoon, bullied into submission by him and unable to dissent for fear of their lives? The terrible face of the “war on terror” is made poignantly human here: “Nobody is innocent here. We are getting blown up every time we go up there to talk to them or build them a well or a school.” As Morlock explains, “the constant pressure to having to kill and being shot at is overwhelming. It is impossible not to surrender to the insanity of it all.”
The Kill Team is easily one of the most thought-provoking documentaries this year and certainly one of the best ones on the war in Afghanistan. It’s a lot more than the plucked from the headlines story of a rogue platoon; it’s the living embodiment of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs:”
Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor
The film is a testimonial to the kind of damage caused for a cause that is impossible to name or understand.

Reviews

The Hundred Foot Journey Film Review

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My review of The Hundred Foot Journey

The Hundred Foot Journey (executive produced by Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg) is part of the same flavorless, homogenized pedigree of culinary tale that Chocolat (director Lasse Hallström’s previous film) belongs to. And like every other film about Western interaction with Indian cooking and culture (Bend It Like Beckham, Eat Pray Love, and other similarly insipid fare), it inevitably fetishizes and exotisizes. In other words, prepare to be really impressed by the use of cardamom… in everything. Talk about a massive reduction.
The film is about a clash of culinary cultures: the spicy and hearty Indian vs. French haute cuisine. Somewhere in the mix is also a homily on “why can’t we all just get along?” The generally amiable vibes and lush cinematography make the movie palatable enough, but don’t look for too much zest or plot innovation.

THE HUNDRED-FOOT JOURNEY

Gifted young chef Hassan (Manish Dayal) and his family move to Europe when their family restaurant in India is uprooted. Hassan’s father, played with winsome comedic flair by Om Puri, has his heart set on a French farm house. Hence, the title of the movie, a reference to the divide between Maison Masala and Madame Mallory’s (Helen Mirren) Michelin-starred French restaurant Le Saule Pleureur. The competition between the two makes for some amusing moments, replete with Helen Mirren’s endearing turn as the droll Madame Mallory; she has a penchant for verbal barbs of the “Your cooking, like music, could use a little turning down” ilk. Hassan has mastered Indian cooking, but he has his sights set on the French “classics” as well. In an (un)surprising turn of events, he ends up under Madame Mallory’s stern tutelage and then goes on Paris. But is molecular gastronomy enough to stoke the culinary fires in his heart? I think we already know the answer to this one.
Hassan meets Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon), Madame’s sous-chef, and professional and romantic sparks fly…or so we are to believe. For a film dedicated to sensory pleasures, this is one tepid romantic concoction. Their chemistry is so off that, even in the scene where Marguerite tastes the French sauces that Hassan has made for her, all we are left with is feeling nice yet terribly unfulfilled.
The Hundred Foot Journey attempts very earnestly to convey the sheer magic of cooking to the viewer. It wants to remind us that cooking is about memories and life experiences a lot more than it is about pure gastronomic enjoyment. Luckily, the main characters of Papa and Madame Mallory are incredibly compelling and watchable; the rest is only so much trite fluff. The film attempts to tackle more serious issues like ethnic tensions and discrimination against immigrants, but lacks the chops to really address them more than merely as an aside.
And the cooking—well, for newbies, it is enjoyable enough, but for serious gastro aficionados (notice I avoided using the dreaded “foodie”), it will leave you groaning at the idea that Indian cooking is “cool” because it involves sprinkling cardamom on everything, adding fresh cilantro to an omelet, or even worse, making “curries.”
The Hundred Foot Journey is undoubtedly pleasant and, mercifully, not too maudlin. It is not terribly thought-provoking or interesting, but it is tasty enough of a morsel for you to savor at least superficially.