The Menu is yet another film that serves the remorseless super rich on a platter and invites audiences to eat, and its popularity appears to only be growing with the movie now available on HBO Max. Set on a small remote island that houses the exclusive restaurant Hawthorne, its staff, and, most importantly, Chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), the film starts with a who’s who of obnoxious elite guests. There’s three entitled finance bros who assume they are the smartest, coolest guys in every room they walk into; an egotistical food critic who delights in ending careers and her brownnosing editor; a washed-up, name-dropping movie star who is desperate to be relevant again and his long suffering aide; an older wealthy couple where the husband has dark secrets and the wife has seemingly checked out; and a young couple consisting of a man who is a selfish, self-proclaimed foodie who feels too strongly (and wrongly) that he belongs, and girl who does not belong there at all.
Guests are taken to the island on a yacht and served champagne and an amuse bouche for the ride. Once they are there, they are greeted by Elsa (Hong Chau), the no nonsense Maître D and given a tour of the island which is where all of Hawthorne’s food is raised or grown and processed before being served in the most inventive of manners. This is what they are paying for. Food that comes straight from the earth to their plates. Detailed descriptions and private tours on how it happens. Staff who know their names and who are there to seemingly bend to all their whims. Despite this, most of the guests barely register these details. The older couple skipped the tour altogether, having done it many times before. Meanwhile Tyler, the foodie (Nicholas Holt), is impressed but he’s still more concerned with regurgitating everything he has memorized about the place rather than showing any genuine reverence or respect.
Most of the guests are there for the exclusivity of it all. They are there for bragging rights, whether they are in the form of loud announcements to other bro friends, subtly and casually dropped into conversation, or printed in a review to remind other critics that a select few of them are highly favored. For Tyler, this is a poorly judged and self-serving pilgrimage. For his date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), this is a wrong place, wrong time situation. She wasn’t the girl Tyler originally invited. For Chef Julian, who is detail-focused, she is a fly in the ointment. An anomaly that could potentially ruin all of his carefully formulated plans.
Anomalies are what appear time and time again in these “eat the rich” films to remind the characters that without their money, they are just creatures with soft underbellies like the rest of us. It’s street smart and tough Margot in The Menu. In Glass Onion, it’s the drawling detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), and in Triangle of Sadness it’s mother nature and literal pirates. The moment something or someone arrives who cannot be bought or controlled, or intimidated, the super-rich are at a loss over what to do. In all three films, the anomaly brings chaos, and chaos is a turner of tables. It takes something more than an impressive bank balance to survive in hostile environments and to keep a cool head under pressure.
Margot has this in spades. The moment she realizes Chef Julian’s culinary adventure isn’t what it seems, she bides her time and makes several solid attempts to get herself off the island and home. She won’t be bullied and she won’t be pressured until she is crushed like the rest. Although she has seemingly lived a colorful life, she is portrayed as innocent in contrast to the other guests. The film follows popular and biblical opinion that the super-rich can never be truly innocent.
While all three films include violence, none of them miss the opportunity to poke fun at their characters first. All three provide genuine laughs. The vomit-inducing dinner scene in Triangle Of Sadness is disgusting and hilarious in equal measure. In Glass Onion, Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson) and Claire (Kathryn Hahn) provide scene-stealing laughs, but the most tear-inducing moment comes from Daniel Craig as Blanc rants at ridiculous billionaire Miles (Ed Norton), who has more money than sense and makes every stupid move in the book, much to Blanc’s chagrin.
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