Movie Review: 'City of Gold'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Get ready, foodies, for a movie that just might speak to you. But budget your time wisely because you will want to eat immediately after.
On its surface, City of Gold is a documentary profile of Jonathan Gold, the restaurant critic previously for L.A. Weekly and Gourmet Magazine, and currently for the Los Angeles Times.
Well, he's really more of a food critic than a restaurant critic because so many of the places he visits, eats at, and writes about aren't exactly restaurants.
So call him a food critic. But not just any food critic. Not only is his the most influential stomach in L.A., he's the first food critic to win the Pulitzer Prize (as Roger Ebert was the first movie critic to do the same).
City of Gold is a portrait of the affable, rotund, insightful Gold, to be sure. But it's also a love letter to vibrant Los Angeles and its diverse food cultures: Hollywood and the Dodgers are mentioned in passing, but this is a peek into the mom-and-pop nooks and crannies – where affordable food is available to working-class folk, many of them immigrants from such places as Korea, Mexico, and China -- that do not usually turn up in movies and television programs set in the City of Angels. For the film's purposes, it's also the City of Gold, which seems to feature ethnic cuisines everywhere.
Gold is certainly interested in the food and food outlets he writes about, shining a spotlight on modest, undiscovered establishments, but he is also using food as a prism through which he can examine the culture the food springs from, exploring the nuances of a hole-in-the-wall dive or a taco truck or noodle shop or sushi bar as if it were something discovered on an anthropological field trip or an archeological dig. And he will often drop in on a place he is in the process of writing about multiple times before posting his column. That, ladies and gentlemen, is taking your beat seriously. And puttin' on the pounds.
If you want to know who people are, Gold seems to be saying, look at what and how they eat. And his writing also addresses the tensions and complications that come with the culinary territory.
Meanwhile, documentarian director Laura Gabbert (Sunset Story, No Impact Man: The Documentary) not only has Gold read excerpts from his fluid and commanding writing, but she interviews L.A.-based chefs who've come from many elsewheres in chase of the American dream.
And after all, as we're reminded at one point, when you take a look along the array of species, you could say that it's cooking that makes us human.
Gold's positive reviews start trends, make places popular, further careers, and boost proprietors' incomes. His viewpoint of our multicultural society is that food holds the potential to bring people together.
Exactly what effect his negative reviews have is less clear because the film pretty much ignores them. Is it possible it happens so seldom that it's not worth mentioning, or is this an oversight on Gabbert's part?
Anyway, Gabbert lets her film meander and repeat itself and resort to driving-around filler in its mid-section after an involving start – perhaps an appropriate way for her to address her procrastinating subject, but an approach that leads to the film sagging when it should be zigzagging.
So we'll broil 2½ stars out of 4 for an okay ode to Jonathan Gold and L.A. and all kinds of food. City of Gold doesn't quite glitter, but it certainly whets the appetite.
