Disney
It’s amazing, as chefs since the beginning of time must surely have reflected, what people are willing to swallow if you give it an appealing name and serve it up pretty. (I refer the innocent diner to the surprise package known as sweetbread.)
The Bear is an eight-part, half-hour comedy-drama — chowder-thick on the drama, consommé-thin on the comedy — that arrives this week on Disney+ accompanied by the kind of slavering American reviews that, were it a restaurant rather than a TV show set in one, would result in six-month waiting lists for a table by the toilets, on a Tuesday.
It is the story of a high-flying, downtrodden gastronaut, Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, aka Bear, who resigns his position at a fancy Manhattan dining room to return to the gritty Chicago neighbourhood where he was raised, in a desperate attempt to save the family sandwich shop from closure, following the suicide of its former owner, his alcoholic brother, Mikey. (I know. It’s a lot.)
Here at The Original Beef of Chicagoland, Carmy’s haute cuisine-y pretentions come up against the spit and sawdust approach that his late brother, and their late father before them, took to running the joint. Carmy is a disciple of Thomas Keller (he once worked at the French Laundry) and Rene Redzepi (there is an entire actual plotline involving the Noma cookbook) and the other preening superheroes of the Michelin Culinary Universe. His co-workers? Not so much. It may well be that there are venerable Chicago chop-shops run on the principles of Auguste Escoffier, but I found myself siding with the character who calls Carmy “pompous and delusional.” He’s also intense and shouty. You know how these chefs are.
The Bear makes no bones about where its sympathies lie: it is in favour of pretension. The only people who resist Carmy’s kitchen revolution are his douchebag frenemy, Richie, and an embittered line cook, Tina — and (spoiler alert!) it doesn’t take too long for those two to begin to warm to the sous vide side. How could they resist? Dude’s got a James Beard award, yo. It’s Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares directed by the Safdie brothers.
And, in fact, it opens with a nightmare: Carmy is alone on a bridge, in the dead of night. In front of him, a cage, which he gingerly opens, releasing an angry you-guessed-it that is just about to pounce when… he wakes up, to a living hell: his supplier hasn’t delivered enough meat. (Talk about living on a knife-edge.) Chronically short of funds, he is forced to take extreme action, ransacking one of the restaurant’s arcade machines of its change (I shit you not, it’s called Ballbreaker) and adding that to his collection of vintage denim (is this what passes for a tough guy move in 2022?), to barter for beef in a parking lot.
FX
But wait, bro. Let’s work this through. What does the bear in the dream really mean? Is Carmy Bear the bear? Is the bear Carmy Bear’s id? Like, his unprocessed trauma in the form of a big, furry mammal? Or is the bear just, you know, a bear?
Alongside the cod-psychoanalysis, The Bear offers lingering shots of stirring and searing and grilling and blanching. No carrot slicing has ever been filmed so reverentially. This is food porn to make Nigella blush. And even the most cynical must concede that, for all its bombast and self-regard, The Bear is as artfully assembled and attractively plated as a three-star salad.
While the dialogue is occasionally cringeworthy — “You cut vegetables like a bitch!”— the camerawork quickly establishes a chop-chop rhythm, the establishing shots of Chicago by night are decorous, the T-shirts are cool and the soundtrack is the type that only a streamer’s budget can stretch to, even if it seems to have been put together by the staff of beardie bible Uncut: Wilco; Van Morrison; Genesis.
Created by Christopher Storer, whose career until now has mainly been as a producer and director of stand-up comedy specials, The Bear has a winning leading man in Jeremy Allen White, previously unknown to me but familiar to US audiences from the American remake of Shameless. As Carmen aka Carmy aka Bear, White’s bulging biceps, lank hair and soulful eyes have made him an unlikely internet crush.
Richie, a walking liability, is played by Evan Moss-Bachrach, a livewire performer who fans of a superior show, Girls, will remember with a shudder as the creepy folk musician, Desi. Ayo Edebiri and Lionel Boyce are sweetly matched as ambitious sandwich shop employees. The always welcome Oliver Platt is Carmy’s presumably mob-adjacent “Uncle” Jimmy. (It’s the Chicago way.)
If it wasn’t quite so overheated and undercooked, if it dialled down the bombast and the anguish and allowed itself some light relief (even a joke, maybe?) The Bear might be something to relish: a fun, bite-sized sitcom about the culture clash between a stressed-out fine-dining chef and his oddball crew of short-order cooks.
FX
But it wants to be so much bigger and more significant than that. Because, of course, The Bear is no more about food than The Sopranos is about organised crime or Mad Men is about advertising. The Bear is about wounded masculinity. It’s about macho white dudes at boiling point. It’s about the howling rage of inarticulate hard men trying to adapt to a world in which their big-mouthed aggression no longer guarantees them a seat at the table. Haunted, wracked, stricken, Carmy and Richie are scared little boys confronting the big questions and coming up clueless. The Bear wants you to blub for them.
That’s OK. There’s surely still room in the culture for writers and directors to address the bruised male ego. And doubtless, as a fellow straight white man, I for one should be pleased that the problems of my kind continue to be thought fit for mainstream drama.
The part I don’t get is, if we’re going to go there, why does he have to be a chef? Am I missing something? Why is the contemporary exemplar of tormented maleness a guy who cooks for a living?
It's certainly true that kitchens are high-pressure environments. But then so are operating rooms, and I don’t know, trading floors and building sites and even newsrooms. Many workplaces, from time to time, are locations for frayed nerves and heightened tension. The Bear would have you believe that running a restaurant is up there with piloting a fighter jet. I’m not buying it.
When it comes to men in extremis, what happened to cops and robbers? Or soldiers and cowboys and boxers? No, really: what happened to boxers?
The single most powerful screen depiction of defeated masculinity I can think of is from Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. It’s the scene where Robert De Niro, as Jake La Motta, pounds his forehead and his fists into the walls of his prison cell, before breaking down and sobbing: “I’m not an animal.” Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, put like that, but it is raw and frightening and genuinely discomfiting. It is a scene one wants to look away from, out of compassion, embarrassment, strength of feeling.
“I coulda been a contender,” Marlon Brando’s prize-fighter tells Rod Steiger, in On the Waterfront. “I coulda been somebody.” He’s wrong. It was never on the cards. (De Niro’s La Motta famously quotes this speech in his gruesome post-retirement nightclub act.) To the men who control things, Brando’s character is just a piece of meat. He’s an animal.
It’s not fair to compare a middling TV show with classics of twentieth century cinema. But so elevated are the claims for The Bear — with British critics predictably falling into obedient lockstep with their US counterparts — that it’s hard to resist. Compared to Brando’s and De Niro’s tragic punching bags, a chef having a hissy-fit over an under-seasoned sauce can’t help feeling like small beer.
For a more convincing recent depiction of a little guy with his life in a vice, try Adam Sandler in the Safdies’ electrifying Uncut Gems, from 2019. I’m not saying they shouldn’t make ‘em any more. I’m saying, why make ‘em about chefs? What’s so compelling about a guy slaving over a hot stove? Haven’t women been doing this for millennia without being lionised — or even acknowledged?
(Coming soon: James Corden as a Michelin-starred chef in crisis in Jez Butterworth’s Mammals. Ralph Fiennes as a sinister chef in The Menu. Now showing: Paul Hollywood as a grizzled bread-maker in The Great British Bake Off.)
I don’t think it’s difficult to diagnose the cause of all this. The Bear arrives on British screens a week ahead of the publication of a new biography of the chef and media personality, Anthony Bourdain. Down and Out in Paradise by Charles Leerhsen has, apparently, depressing new details about the last days of Bourdain, who killed himself in a French hotel room in 2018, at the age of 61.
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Bourdain was, by his own admission, a middling cook who became famous overnight thanks to his bestselling 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential. That book, in the guise of a lid-lifting confessional, romanticised the seamier side of a life in whites. Bourdain became the ideal of the rock’n’roll culinary bad-boy, and the model for the twenty-first century celebrity chef.
Some people love sushi, others think that raw fish stinks the place out. Some people sat through Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, marvelling at the man’s extraordinary humanity, others (me) spent the time hugging the sick bucket. Hagiographic, lachrymose, this sloppy documentary rehearsed every cliché of the spiritual seeker in its attempt to confer secular sainthood on a man who didn’t deserve it (who does?) and surely would not have wanted it (who would?)
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Clearly Bourdain had something. Call it charisma, for convenience. And I don’t doubt he meant the world to his friends and family. But I found myself confirmed in the opinion that Bourdain was a self-mythologising, solipsistic, overgrown adolescent, hopelessly in thrall to the same tired old archetypes that autodidactic men of his generation so often venerate. He was a Hemingway-reading, Hunter Thompson wannabe. And, sadly, he ended up like they did. Really, what’s to celebrate? Ken Burns’s recent Hemingway documentary was ponderous in the extreme, but at least it had the exceptional achievements to justify its existence, if not quite its six-hour run time. Bourdain’s greatest claim to fame remains that thanks to him, we all now know not to order fish on a Monday. Is this the best we can do now, when it comes to fallen idols?
We had our own Bourdain in this country for a while, the preposterous Marco Pierre White, a brawny Yorkshireman who was forever losing his temper and throwing customers out of his restaurants. What a card! His role was usurped by Gordon Ramsay, a charmless ham whose bully-boy antics mysteriously endeared him to first our own nation, and then to America.
It's thanks to that lot that boxers are no longer on the specials board, and chefs — chefs! — have been promoted to dishes of the day. Wanna see what Hollywood’s idea of a real man looks like in 2022? Check out Carmy Berzatto.
The Bear is fine. You should watch it. It’s no more profound than a hot dog.
As Jake La Motta told us, staring into his dressing room mirror, that’s entertainment.
The Bear is on Disney Plus from October 5.
Alex Bilmes has been Editor-in-Chief of Esquire since 2011. His many pieces for the magazine include profiles of Tony Blair, George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, Paul McCartney, Idris Elba, Penelope Cruz, Giorgio Armani, Daniel Craig, David Beckham, Sean Penn, Michael Caine and Keir Starmer. He has also written widely on the arts, culture, books, sport, fashion, politics, society, food and more for publications including the Guardian, the Financial Times, and Vogue.
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