The holiday season is normally for getting together to share a traditional meal. Since that is (or certainly
should be) off the table this year, let’s do our best to replace your holiday feast with one of the best movie meals of all time.
Whether it’s an old school feast or a smorgasbord of collected family favorites, people eating together is a peculiarly human activity we all relate to in different ways. Maybe the thought of holiday meals pleasantly reminds you of the distant branches of your family tree. Maybe it makes you start rehearsing that speech you’re going to scream at Uncle Mike if he opens that door even a little. Whatever it is, there will be drama of all types, and movies have long exploited meals to the same ends.
We don’t want you to miss out on your usual holiday feelings if we can help it, so in place of the meal you’re (hopefully, even though yes, it’s a bummer, but c’mon guys, let’s just all get through this) missing this year, let’s find the right movie meal for you.
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The Awkward Meal
Top Pick: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
The awkward meal is a classic scene with many great examples, too many to fully list even. Everybody’s had a holiday meal made notorious in their family that would qualify. Things aren’t going great in the house and nobody wants to talk about it. In fact, the lack of genuine engagement is the most painful part.
If this is something you’re missing out on, you can look to the personality quirks coming to light over lunch in The Breakfast Club, while discussing milking cats with Robert De Niro in Meet the Parents, or when meeting the parents in avery different way in Eraserhead (a scene that’s recently been matched by Charlie Kaufmann’s excellent I’m Thinking of Ending Things on Netflix). Maybe revisit Lars, from Lars and the Real Girl, introducing his sex doll “girlfriend” to his brother and sister-in-law.
But more than perhaps any other scene, try being painfully, silently squished between your boyfriend’s parents at a dinner you didn’t even want to go to in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
Often these awkward meals get uncomfortable not from people saying the wrong things, but because nobody can say the right things. It can be right in front of everyone on a silver platter, but nobody at the table is able to see it. In 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, for seven and a half unbroken, excruciating minutes, that couldn’t be more clear. The conversation is pleasant enough, polite even. But it keeps skating past the truth of the matter. The character Gabita is not okay and the act of flinging insubstantial wordsat each other makes it that much worse.
The scene forces us to stare at the discomfort in a oner that never moves, never engages in the hollow liveliness at the rest of the table. It sits still and stares at the awkwardness and, in doing so, captures the unmistakable sense of being alone in a crowd, of being in the middle of a party but still feeling a million miles away.
The Unspoken Secret
Top Pick: Inglourious Basterds
Sometimes there’s an elephant in the room that only one person knows about. These are the unspoken secrets and there are a ton of incredible meal scenes built around them. Somebody at the table knows something the others don’t and they circle around it like pushing peas on a plate.
This is used to hilarious effect several times in Mrs. Doubtfire, and to disturbing effect when Ray Liotta eats his own brain in Hannibal. Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love has a few textbook examples of moving and tragic secrets being kept, while the Goodfellas yuk it up over ma’s cooking with a body in the trunk.
But for our favorite exploration of unspoken secrets, we’re looking at Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. While much has been made of the opening farmhouse confrontation, and deservedly so, really they only drink milk in that scene and that can hardly be considered a meal. Instead, if you want to feel what it’s like to keep a secret over the dinner table, check out Shoshanna’s lunch with Joseph Goebbels for a secret that takes the cake… err… strudel.
The lunch starts stressfully enough, with Shoshanna ably hiding her Jewish ancestry and backing up her fake ID. But when Colonel Landa enters the fray something fascinating happens. The secret that’s been swimming beneath the table cloth shifts from Shoshanna concealing her identity to Landa knowing she’s concealing her identity.
And while neither she nor us can be sure how much he truly knows, it’s enough to make all of us squirm either way. Like a cigarette jammed into your strudel, the viewer lives with Shoshanna, realizing you’ve lost the grip on the conversation and it’s now dangerously careening towards revealing your secret.
Romance
Top Pick: Moonlight
There’s a cinematic shorthand for romance over dinner that is unmissable. Borrowing energy from both awkward meals and the unspoken secret meals, the best romantic meals involve two people that love each other, but do that wonderful little dance, bashfully tiptoeing around their as-yet-unspoken desire.
This is, like, half of When Harry Met Sally. It’s also the forbidden attraction between Vincent Vega and Mrs. Mia Wallace at Jack Rabbit Slims in Pulp Fiction. There’s an almost shockingly well executed version of this in Nocturnal Animals, a film for which “romantic” would never be the appropriate descriptor. This is of course Lady and the Tramp’s famous spaghetti scene and Hot Shots Part Deux’s slightly less famous spoof of that scene where Charlie Sheen eats his own shoe lace.
But we have to focus on 2016 Best Picture winner Moonlight and it’s very exceptional diner scene between Chiron and Kevin. On the surface it’s two old friends catching up, but just beneath the surface their attraction is never fully out of sight. Flitting back and forth between layers there is love and bravado and shame and vulnerability and all the things that come along with a shared history neither of the men quite have the courage to talk about. The real dialogue is exchanged in their looks and the expert blocking of the scene. Ultimately, it’s a song that finishes the conversation for them.
Conflict in the Subtext
Top Pick: Phantom Thread
But if romance isn’t the thing you’re missing from your cancelled holiday plans, perhaps it’s conflict? A disagreement that’s getting worked out without being directly addressed?
These are rarely fun topics. If they were fun they’d be easier to openly talk about. So you can find examples of these meals centered around marital resentment in Revolutionary Road, disillusionment in Before Midnight, or even fear of the unknown in Signs.
For the best example of this, nothing beats the end of Phantom Thread. From a film chock full of incredible dining, from cold, quiet breakfasts to fiery dinner arguments, there’s nothing quite so incredible as Alma poisoning Woodcock’s dinner right in front of him, and him willingly eating it.
The scene is an incredible game of chicken, with the conflict that’s been building for the entire film coming to a head in a perverse staring contest, the stakes of which are nothing short of a total shift in their relationship dynamics. Watch the way she pours the water, the way he uses his fork and knife, the way he chews and swallows. Every tiny gesture has a meaning and a consequence and leads to an articulate, yet unspoken resolution to a twisted relationship.
Vying for Power
Top Pick: Fury
What if your holiday plans involved a hostile takeover of your family’s power structure? If you find yourself missing some subtext that’s just about control and the conversation is a proxy battle for it, check out the final dinner Helen Mirren serves to Michael Gambon in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. There’s a terrible Thanksgiving dinner in Scent of a Woman worth watching along with the first big meal from August Osage County and every meal in The Lighthouse.
But to really get your fill of an unspoken power struggle, go with the uninvited breakfast in the German house in Fury.
When the rest of the men, drunk and angry, barge in mid-breakfast, accusing Don and Norman of “playing house,” the meal quickly becomes a dangerous battlefield on which the men try to undermine, humiliate and sabotage while maintaining plausible deniability that that’s not what they’re really doing.
In the process, everything but the actual weapons becomes a weapon; the food itself, the way they take up space, and while no one ever quite openly questions Don’s authority as sergeant, it’s clear they’re flirting with a coup. The scene is dynamic and incredibly uncomfortable, and keeps the tendencies of occupying forces to commit heinous war crimes close to the viewers’ minds at all times.
The most remarkable thing about the scene are the hints of how much worse the unspoken reality might be.
The Blow-Up
Top Pick: The Godfather
Even the most seasoned of Thanksgiving diners knows that conflict can’t stay unspoken forever. At some point the conflict simmering below the surface will boil over. Think about the spaghetti dinner scene in 10 Cloverfield Lane, the steak dinner gone horribly wrong in Raging Bull, or the traumatically explosive dinner in Hereditary.
But for the ultimate blow up, it has to be the dinner parlay between Michael and Sollozzo in The Godfather.
In a scene filled with secrets, suspense, power plays and the kinds of empty niceties concealing serious threats that make for all the best holiday meals, this turning point of a scene from The Godfather comes with a misdirect. We know what Michael is there to do, but we don’t know if or how he’s going to go through with it. The meal itself punctuates the disrespect being shown to Michael, especially Sterling Hayden’s obnoxiously entitled Captain McCluskey. And in a train-wheel-screeching crescendo, Michael explodes with a violence that’s as calm and measured as he’d been the whole scene, while everything that had been previously unsaid is unleashed onto Sollozzo and his crony.
Competition
Top Pick: Hook
Let’s move away from all the subtext and get into some good old-fashioned name calling, a staple of any holiday meal that’s more of a chore than a choice. If this is what you’re longing for — a dinner table turned naked battleground for competition — look to Whiplash and Andrew absolutely dunking on his cousins, or the diner stand-off between DeNiro and Pacino in Heat.
But for the top pick of this group, we’re going with the hypercolor food fight from Hook. As the kids divide into teams and hurl some remarkably childish insults at each other, the oohs and aaahs and “BANGARANG”s chart a course of Peter relearning his playfulness. In another film, that would’ve been enough to make for a great meal scene, but add in food that appears from the power of belief and in the space of one simple, but incredibly effective edit, and the meal becomes a classic.
The childish humor captures a balance between love and aggression, and the food fight that emerges is one of the best ever on screen. This meal is a delight, and should scratch the itch for anybody missing a shouting match with family they only see once or twice a year.
Family Dynamics
Top Pick: Fanny and Alexander
For those who actually enjoy their family’s company and are missing that particular brand of warm and fuzzy, we can look at films that are less about conflict or even plot movement. These are movie meals you might call “the family portrait meal.”
Think about the opening of Little Miss Sunshine, or throughout the old friends reunion in The Big Chill. But for a marvelous and far-reaching family portrait, there’s none better than the Christmas feast in Fanny and Alexander.
Nowhere on film has the sprawling, intergenerational dynamics of a family been better mapped through time than in Fanny and Alexander, by which of course we mean this movie is very long. The late-career Ingmar Bergman epic is five and a half hours, but the Christmas dinner — the centerpiece of the first of the film’s four parts — finds all the disparate relations come together in the same room.
It’s a togetherness that is not in the rest of the film, but the feast has everything: song, cheer, intergenerational disconnect, substance abuse, class struggle, creepy uncles, the shadow of trauma, literally everything a large and vibrant family could hope for. It’s all swirling around a single, massive dinner table and evolving as the night wears on and the liquor flows.
The only thing it’s missing is a significant throughline. The sequence doesn’t move anywhere in particular, opting instead to be a snapshot of one idiosyncratic family, with all their lovingly catalogued peculiarities. And Bergman handles them all in such a way that makes them feel universal. The people on screen, like those in our lives, are exactly the same kind of unique.
Just Conversation
Top Pick: The Trip
If you haven’t found a movie that’s an adequate stand-in for the usual holiday meal yet, let’s try one that’s made from a little less weighty stuff. Some meals, after all, are just about the joy of conversation over a bite to eat.
You can find this style of movie meal in the opening of Reservoir Dogs, as the characters are musing over Madonna lyrics and how best to tip a waitress. We love when entire films like Coffee and Cigarettes are built around conversational vignettes. Again though, there’s no meal there, so for our top pick we’re looking to a pair of British comedians on a culinary tour in The Trip.
Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s series from the BBC, repurposed into now four feature films, finds the pair travelling to noted restaurants around the world and, nowhere more effectively than in their first outing, kind of vaguely competing, usually about who does a better celebrity impression.
But there are no stakes beyond ego. No ends other than the competition itself and no judges other than each other. It’s just two very entertaining companions hitting the silly sweet spot of utterly-pointless-but-very-important-to-us that only old friends can nail. And it never gets better than their now famous dueling Michael Caines, breaking down the iconic actor’s voice with a keenly scrutinizing taxonomy that makes us jealous.
For the Love of the Food
Top Pick: Babette’s Feast
And as we get to our last spot, let’s talk about what’s at the core of these holiday meals: the actual food. There are plenty of films that luxuriate in what’s on the plate and cinema can truly make your stomach growl when it wants to.
Think about pretty much all of Ratatouille, but especially when Anton Ego tries the famous dish at the end. You can find it sinfully in Chocolat, sensually in 9 1/2 Weeks, miserably in The Turin Horse, ecstatically in Big Night, devotedly in Chef, hilariously in Tampopo, but never more magically or with more delight than in Babette’s Feast.
Babette is a refugee from Paris, taken in by a deeply religious family, who finds herself with a sudden windfall of cash. And instead of financing her way back to her old life, she spends all the money on one lavish meal for the local congregation in a massive act of thanks.
But the Protestants notice the arrival of opulent ingredients and decide, in keeping with their scripture, that it would be sinful to enjoy such earthly pleasures. While they all attend the meal to humor Babette, they all agree not to speak of the food or however much they may be enjoying it.
And as Babette prepares the meal, filmed with shots as gorgeously composed as her dishes, the special guest, a general with no compunction about heaping praise on the incredible meal, begins to pronounce his pleasure with ever greater eloquence — even while expressing shock that the holy rollers are so nonchalant. Finally, sensation wins out, and even the quaint quakers can’t resist.
This is a movie meal about the emotional power of food and how beautiful it can be when imbued with love. It’s about saying thank you the best way you know how, even if it may fall on deaf ears. More than anything, Babette’s Feast is about the food, which is why we think it’s one of the best movie meals of all time.
Hopefully you’ve been able to find a meal to stand in for that special kind of energy you’re missing out on this holiday season. And if 3000-word pieces breaking down the intricacies of hyper-specific film tropes is your thing, be sure to subscribe to CineFix on YouTube for more!
