The film opens with Kate, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, giving a sensuous discourse on quails, which we come to learn are the stars of her most famous recipe as the head chef at the New York restaurant 22 Bleeker. "There's no greater sin than to overcook a quail," she pronounces, and the rest of the screenplay doesn't get any less contrived than that.
I rolled my eyes and wondered whether this would just be a pretense for contemplating her perfect face for 105 minutes, and was only somewhat relieved when she shared the screen with her clichd shrink played by Bob Balaban. The highly-strung Kate doesn't know why she's been referred to therapy. "I prefer to have things done exactly right, that's why I end up doing things myself," she tells him, and we begin to see the disintegration of the control she demands in her kitchen and in her life.
We meet Kate's sister minutes before she is killed by a car accident and leaves her daughter Zoe, played by Abigail Breslin, to Kate's shaky parenting skills.Kate characteristically refuses to take time off from work to mourn, but cannot resist disruption to her obsessive regime: She inherits the care of Zoe and has the first of several mini-breakdowns in the freezer of the restaurant kitchen. Work is her life. We get it.
The changes in Kate's life don't end there. After her boss, played by "The Closer's" Patricia Clarkson forces her to take a few days off, Kate comes back to the kitchen to find she's been temporarily replaced by her complete antithesis, Nick, played by Aaron Eckhardt, a smooth-talking, cleft-chinned hunk who never travels without his boom box playing opera and his nauseating smirk. It was Nick that ruined the whole experience for me. If the film had been an entree, he would have been that side dish that made me send the whole plate back to the kitchen. Even though I knew he couldn't compare to Sergio Castellitto, who played the role in the German version, I still wanted to give him a chance. However, I found his complacent, inexperienced character completely unbelievable as a chef at a major New York restaurant, and unbelievable as the eventual seducer of a beautiful professional woman.
But if I wanted to start listing what was unbelievable in "No Reservations," I'd have to go on far too long, and after all there is something satisfying about knowing early on in a movie exactly how the plot is going to turn out. Kate fails as a guardian, leaving Zoe at school one day, and in penance Kate offers to grant any wish. Sure enough, when Zoe comes into the kitchen with Kate, she too, falls for Nick's smirks and marinara, and cashes in her wish for a three-person date that leads, with one brief blip, to Kate's first relationship in four years.
I was grateful for Abigail Breslin, who seems to be going somewhere, having stolen the spotlight from big names in both "Little Miss Sunshine" and this film. Breslin knows how to participate in a dialogue even when she isn't speaking, which I'm not convinced Jones has yet mastered. She has potential as a viable and non-conventional alternative to Dakota Fanning's breed of frighteningly quirky pre-pubescent. Just keep her out of the horror movies and she can stay unharmed by Hollywood's tendency to make very young actors creepy. She plays the parentless middle-schooler compassionately, but doesn't overdo it.
In case you are wondering, the contrived plot is the same in the original version as well, but somehow the subtitles made this less noticeable and more realistic. In the end, I'm convinced it's Eckhardt, that overily-handsome male lead, who kills the believability. You're not cheering for the underdog in this movie.
In the German version, the hound dog-faced Sergio Castellitto wins hearts because he seems so genuine person that you want him to get with Martina Gedeck and it seems realistic that he might have a struggle. But you can't so easily identify with the American interpertation -- a perfect guy bullshitting a perfect woman, even if she's a little unhinged. After all, too much perfection can be boring.
