A Thanksgiving Movie That Actually Isn't a Turkey

I've gotten so used to cringing and rolling my eyes at most of Hollywood's attempts at multicultural storytelling -- Spanglish, for example -- that I found it quite refreshing to come across an American movie with a multiracial cast that is actually quite entertaining. Unfortunately, the film in question -- the 2000 release What's Cooking? -- has the type of title that suggests that it is not a serious movie but some sort of wacky screwball comedy chockful of eccentric stereotypes. To be fair, the movie has more than a few elements -- a unfaithful Latino father, an Asian-American gangsta wannabe, etc. -- that border upon the stereotypical. But it also deals with these elements in such a believable way that I never quite found myself wanting to roll my eyes at the pretentiousness of the film's dialogue like I did with Bulworth and Crash.

The film concerns four different families -- one Jewish, one Vietnamese, one Mexican-American and one African-American -- whose members come together in Los Angeles to celebrate Thanksgiving in their own unique fashion. Each family has their own set of unique problems. Each family, nevertheless, tries to resolve its problems with a minimum of fuss, only to find that it does not necessarily always work out that way. Though various family members are continually crossing paths with members of the other families, it is not until the end that the film points out once and for all just how close to one another these four different families actually are.

It's been implied by one of the reviewers on IMDB that this film's view of L.A.'s racial politics seemed more inspired by wishful thinking than reality. And one could argue that at times the film is a bit too hopeful about its view of human nature. For example, the Vietnamese family is shown raising a fuss about a visit the daughter receives from her white American boyfriend while she is working in the family video store -- yet later on the movie suggests that a visit from a son's Mexican-American girlfriend would meet with a happier reception. In another episode, the son of an African-American political aide is shown throwing paint at his father's employer. But when the same son shows up for Thanksgiving dinner and is seen by one of the father's white co-workers, the co-worker -- who witnessed the paint throwing -- seems remarkably low-key about this revelation.

Yet every time the movie got to the point when I found myself anticipating Paul Haggis-style melodramatics, the movie would surprise me by going in a different direction. Much of the melodrama in the Vietnamese household, for example, had the potential to turn into a bad episode of All-American Girl but then we're given a rather quiet scene between the Americanized daughter and her Vietnamese-speaking grandmother in which the grandmother actually proves more sympathetic to the daughter's problems than one would expect. The melodrama in the African-American household in which the political aide's stressed-out wife is attempting to deal with various family problems while at the same time trying to keep her conservative mother-in-law happy could have very easily turned into the stuff of bad sitcoms -- but the film does not go that route. Ditto the melodramas in the Latino and the Jewish households.

The result is not the type of film that will appeal to every type of moviegoer -- but it is certainly the type of holiday movie that deserves to be remembered for far more than its less-than-memorable title. And you do not even have to be Californian to like it.