The Kitchen (2019)
(On Cable TV, March 2020) Performative female empowerment, 1970s cosplay and antiheroic rhetoric smash into each other in The Kitchen, a crime thriller taking us back to 1978 NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood to show how three mob wives turn to crime in order to make ends meet while their husbands are in prison. It’s no accident if the film happens to showcase three of the most notable actresses of the moments in a search for serious drama credentials: Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss, all thoroughly deglammed and relishing their tough-girl roles. Haddish arguably gets the most out of it: Moss’s dramatic credentials are solid and McCarthy’s been pretty good in off-persona dramatic roles, but Haddish’s career has been almost entirely comic to date, so there’s something new for her to do here. In bits and pieces, The Kitchen is fun: while the narrative is often ham-fisted in how to get from Point A to Point B, seeing our heroines discover some self-resourcefulness as underdogs is an engrossing crowd-pleasing arc. Writer-director Andrea Berloff has fun with her material, Margo Martindale has a good supporting turn and Trump gets a not-so-subtle slam in passing. Highlights include a romantic meet-cute in which a supporting hero (Domhnall Gleeson) meets one of the heroines by shooting her would-be rapist dead, then teaching her how to dismember the body and dump it in the river. (Dismemberment becomes such a recurring motif in this film that it becomes almost comic in its predictability—whelp, someone’s getting dismembered at the end of this scene!) Alas, this leads us to The Kitchen’s more vexing aspect, which is to say its problematic use of violence as empowerment. While the film does lead us closer to a realization that the real antagonists are male-dominated power structures, the underdog status of the heroines turns into hubris. With an ending that’s not as retributive as one could hope for, the film doesn’t even approach an argument that violence is not necessarily more acceptable when it’s perpetrated by women—hypocrisy becomes real in the film’s last-act ballet of revenge when the husbands are released from prison and the action goes all over the place. (Unlike other movies, The Kitchen is weakly-built enough that it does not earn its use of violence.) A few twists punctuate the end of the film, leaving an impression that there’s a better movie somewhere in The Kitchen that is not fully realized—and, in fact, may not be fully realizable at the moment where violence is portrayed as being good as long as it’s committed by the good people on the bad people.
