To date Christopher Storer’s work had been limited to television commissions taping comedian performances. Little baggage to undertake a series of certain claims. Fortunately for him, the Hulu channel has opted for this modest production of eight chapters whose total footage does not exceed four hours, mostly shot on a single stage and with unknown performers. The result could not be better because we are facing one of the series of the year.
And that the argument is not particularly original because what we are told are the problems of a restaurant run by a starred chef who leaves behind the luxury and frills to try to revive the family business, an Italian specialty of sandwiches, after his brother’s suicide. Subject that Jon Favreau has already tackled in his uneven comedy “Chef”. The difference is that “The Bear” has more pretensions because while combining comedy and drama, it tries to give the plot a greater narrative vigor, with conflicts on the surface, trying to get closer to the reality of a kitchen in these times of confusion and haste, of social networks and imaginative presentations even if the place is not the panacea.
And his script works because the motivations of the characters are not alien to us, with their strengths and weaknesses. Overwhelmed by pressure in more than one moment and overwhelmed by bills and in constant struggle against commercial chains. In fact, it’s interesting how these honest restaurants that work with quality ingredients and a love of cooking differ from the big franchises and their horrible fast food model. Also, setting the story in Chicago gives it a big-city feel but without the “glamour” of Los Angeles or New York, making the homeland of the Bulls another protagonist.
But if what is being told is good, the best way to do it is because the deployment of the technique in the eight episodes is fabulous, reaching a paroxysm in the seventh where in a spectacular long shot of over twenty minutes it brings us closer to the madness and the nerves that these cooks suffer in a day with an overwhelming workload due to a computer failure. In between we can enjoy a near-homage to “The Sopranos” at a crazy party for a friend, played by Oliver Platt who seems to be into the New Jersey mob family.
And a brilliant editing exercise is added to the powerful staging, in the line of Damien Chazelle’s cinema which is directly related to that prodigy of editing who was “Flick” or with the series “The Eddy”, with which it has many similarities in dealing with the problem of artistic venues (replacing the jazz club with a restaurant with certain airs) in a single environment. I don’t know if Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo as filmmakers took the author of “La La Land” as a model, but the coincidences don’t seem accidental.
Few familiar faces in the cast, with the exception of a couple of cameos by the aforementioned Oliver Platt, Jon Bernthal or Molly Ringwald but where they all work like a metronome led by a brilliant Jeremy Allen White, an actor without much relevance who has found with his Carmy Berzatto the role of his life and to which his cousin in fiction, the better known Ebon Moss-Bachraf, whose successes are limited to 2017 with that expensive HBO whim in the form of a short tribute to “Lost in translation” entitled “Tokyo”, replica.project” and an important role in the Disney and Netflix co-production “The Punisher”. His role is more histrionic but gives him that point of madness that almost the whole series has, with a result as good as the dishes they prepare in The Original Beef of Chicagoland.
