It’s a bit telling the way that the recently released “The Kitchen” immediately draws comparisons to last year’s Steve McQueen crime film “Widows” and the upcoming Lorene Scafaria film “Hustlers”. Each film centres on women who come to be involved in the criminal world more as a means of survival than for any vested interest in crime. Their involvement over time seems to be represented as astuteness emanating from their womanliness. The comparison tracks, to be fair. But, what’s instructive about the immediate comparisons is what it reveals. Let’s imagine, for a minute, that “The Kitchen” were about a trio of mob husbands who unwittingly move to take over the criminal enterprises they marry into. Men and crime. Hardly a new idea, even if it’s made for scores of compelling films. The fact that crime films so rarely focus on women in this way puts “The Kitchen” in an awkward position, especially when it precedes and succeeds such obviously similar films. It seemed stuck in the middle even before it opened to disappointing commercial and critical response, but I find the film more compelling than its dismal reputation. “The Kitchen” works best when it leans into its promise of wish-fulfilment for these ignored women.
In 1978 in Hell’s Kitchen, three women’s lives are changed when their husband, members of the Irish mob, are sent to jail for robbery. The three women are, Melissa McCarthy’s Kathy, a doting mother of two; Elisabeth Moss’ Claire, a battered wife of a priggish man; and Tiffany Haddish’s Ruby, a black woman at odds with the whiteness of the Irish culture around her. The story needs to move from this Point A to the eventual Point B where the three wives take over the organised crime operations of the neighbourhood. The true verve of the movie begins at point B, but “The Kitchen” is based on a meticulously plotted comic book miniseries and it is immediately hampered in the way it trips over itself trying to establish the initial crisis to get the women to Point B. This plot-line also suggests a film more interested in real world complexities than what the kitchen wants to offer to us. It’s a consistent paradox running through the film – torn between an ironic, tongue-in-cheek tone that makes a mockery of murder, carnage and violence and something more serious, and incisively prestigious. The first sound cue, the Etta James cover of ‘It’s A Man’s World’, sums it up. It’s such an obvious choice, even if it’s pointing out the film’s through-line – you need women to make the world work – it’s working too hard to show the things that the film will show us in ten minutes time.
It’s an understandable issue, though. Andrea Berloff writes and directs the film (in her directorial debut) and is clearly working at a heady pace to get the story off the ground so we can get to our required alliance among the three women. But any good crime film depends on the build-up as much as the release and “The Kitchen” is a mere 103 minutes, which feels dangerously short for a film that has hours of story within it. It’s clear lots of context was lost in the cutting of the film, which is frenetically edited in a way that ends up counter-intuitively working to create a mood of chaos on screen. And so, the film’s greatest liability is that surface level movement from plot-point to plot-point – everything feels a bit illusory. But that illusoriness becomes a weapon over-time The film never really achieves the sort of incisive depth that a story of women being forced to take the reins in that era would look like, but by the time one of the women sits with a would-be paramour in a bathroom and romantically dismember a body, “The Kitchen” has abandoned reality for a an amusingly taut upside-down reality, and it’s that zany reality that film runs with.
Berloff does not consistently lean into the comic sensibilities of the story, but costume designer Sarah Edwards (who did stunning work on last year’s women’s crime drama “Ocean’s Eight”) sure does. If it feels like feint praise to single out the costumes as one of the film’s best assets, it’s not. In the absence of a script that can really provide the profundity the story sometimes avoids, context clues come from elsewhere and Edwards uses colour and print as characterisation motifs to augment that ridiculousness of this imagined Hell’s Kitchen in some delightful ways. This is especially effective with Haddish’s Ruby, a woman always outside of the white space she’s trying to infiltrate.
And, if the clothes make the (wo)man then Edwards is lucky enough that McCarthy, Moss and Haddish are each committed to their work. The film’s own inability to be incisive means that the women are left drawing characters from schematic roots, but they’re all digging deep even in the absence of context. Moss fares best, perhaps because she has the least lines. Berloff gives her characters some good quips occasionally, but she seems oddly reticent about leaning into the theatricality of the story. So, Moss and her winning rapport with Domhnall Gleeson as a bizarrely romantic-assassin benefits from doing more with less. McCarthy and Haddish are no slouches, though, subverting their comedic personas in key scenes and then utilising them when you least expect. It’s blunt stuff that never goes for subtlety, but it’s hard to resist the propulsive magnetism of what’s on-screen, even when things get messy.
And, “The Kitchen” is messy. But I balk at the idea that it’s wielding girl power in some limited way. The film, instead, is quite doggedly assured in its own deliberate amorality. It’s refreshing in a way – we’re never necessarily invited to see these women as aggressively sympathetic past the first act. Instead, it’s more of a wish-fulfilment situation where we amorally take deluded pleasure in their messy ways of making things right in their own world. There’s a mid-film revelation of a religious official murdered on his step that halts the celebratory violence and slyly, if very understatedly, reckons with how messed up everything is. But this is a mob movie after all. Surely messiness is not out-of-place. “The Kitchen” may not be receiving any plaudits for incisiveness but it’s clear-eyed in its value, offering an intriguing kind of fantasy of blood and female alliances. It deserves better than the cold response it’s received.
