Execrable: Chocolat

Chocolat (2000)
Directed by Lasse Hallström
Written by Joanne Harris, Robert Nelson Jacobs
Produced by Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein, Alan C. Blomquist, Meryl Poster, Michelle Raimo, Kit Golden, David Brown, Leslie Holleran, Mark Cooper
Starring Juliette Binoche, Alfred Molina, Lena Olin, Johnny Depp, Victoire Thivisol, Judi Dench, Hugh O’Conor, Peter Stormare, Carrie-Anne Moss, Aurelien Parent Koenig
Viewers affected by glycemic disorders aren’t advised to view the most successful and saccharine of Hallström’s many syrupy features in a single sitting; conceivably, anyone prone to horripilation may also suffer convulsions of a severity thitherto unimaginable when subjected to this foul fable of a periodically migratory chocolatier (Binoche), whose animacy and perceptivity regarding her vendees’ adversities and sweet teeth endear her to the less subdued residents of a rigidly religious village in postwar France. Throughout Harris’s puerile story, every conflict is contrived, each character a caricature. A latitudinarian society of Mary Sues comprising Binoche’s errant artisan, her cute daughter (a heinously dubbed Thivisol), one battered housewife (Olin), a miserably cynical old bat (Dench), and her morbid drafter of a grandson (Koenig) resist the provincial proprieties imposed by the hamlet’s stuffily overbearing mayor (Molina) and the gauring, pusillanimous priest (O’Conor) under his thumb who assay the reclamation of a churlish publican (Stormare) to curb his domestic abuse by dint of penance and catechesis. Another implausible clash and prerequisite love interest are severally incorporated by a bitchy mother (Moss, presumably manifesting internalized patriarchal oppression) and daffily debonaire Irish Gypsy (Depp). Hopelessly trifled away by a director (whose unceasing and seemingly obstinate ignorance of dramatic rudiments befuddles even the most hardened cinephile) on an incorrigibly risible script, a respectable cast are reduced to the weirdly stilted yet hammy delivery now omnipresent in televised and cinematic productions: odious drama club theatrics revisited as professional pabulum. Somnambulant Depp here launched the drearily perfunctory phase of his career that’s yet afoot, and his silly flourishes prove particularly peeving as yet another bathetically romanticized Romani — a portrayal of galling and specious political correctness proposed to patronize Roma who know better for the entertainment of Anglos who should. Numerous hokey hallmarks of Hallström’s glorified Lifetime picture wantonly layer treacle upon his unpalatably overproduced glop, especially shopworn narration paired with Rachel Portman’s cloying score to augur whichever few plot points aren’t predictable during the first act. A shred of depth is implied by the protagonist’s perpetuation of a ritual no more fruitful or righteous than those of her papal antagonists, but even this is enacted and duly resolved in as artless and obvious a manner as one could expect. Therewithal, whenever common flaws of a conservative society — which here hardly reflect the ethos of Gallic parochial life — are demonstrated in a work exuding typically trite Anglo-American convictions, deleterious phenomena such as spousal abuse and groundless xenophobia are trivialized, only addressed to safely vilipend a majority. This particular stamp of heterodox allegory might’ve been marginally subversive during the commercial culmination of Stanley Kramer’s popular propaganda forty-odd years prior, but by 2000 it was long since as dated as banal, another tired stab at Catholic tradition to propitiate aging suburban boomers and their equally guileless offspring, all weaned on the dissent of a counterculture long since expired and reanimated by corporate media entities. Yet to ostentatious hausfrauen, civilization began circa 1960; the Weinsteins craftily baited yet another hook for the gaping maws of a lucrative target demographic. Confections prominently snacked and snarfed appear ambrosial, but the contemptible subtext that Harris, Hallström, etc. peddle here is nothing save nauseous.