About all I remember about the 2000 romantic drama Chocolat was a joke Jimmy Fallon made about it at Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update desk that it was Choco-boring and he wanted his Choco-money back. That joke didn’t work either on print or coming out of Fallon’s mouth, but that doesn’t mean I can’t check the movie out before it leaves HBO at the end of the month.
And hopefully it isn’t Choco-boring.
Vianne Rocher (Juliette Binoche) and her daughter Anouk (Victoire Thivisol but dubbed to English by Sally Taylor-Isherwood) blow into a small French village as Vianne more or less literately goes wherever the wind blows her. Or, at least, she claims to. She almost immediately seeks out an old woman (Judi Dench) with an apartment and shop to rent. Vianne makes and sells her own chocolates, and that doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem except that Lent is just starting up, and the devout Catholic mayor of the town, Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina), is absolutely scandalized by this. Reynaud doesn’t care for the fact that an unmarried mother who doesn’t dress right or attend mass is setting up such a source of temptation during Lent of all times. And since Reynaud even has editing power over the local young priest’s sermons, he’s a man used to getting his own way by keeping the village in the austere manner he thinks it should be. Basically, he’s speaking for the Church more than even the village priest does.
So, can tradition beat out whatever the chocolate does? Vianne quickly makes some friends around the village, including her landlady who doesn’t let out she’s diabetic, and then a traveling “river rat” named Roux (Johnny Depp) who seems to be the only person she’s ever met that she didn’t instantly provide his favorite chocolate for without his telling her what he prefers.
The movie, from director Lasse Hallstrom and featuring his wife Lena Olin in a supporting role, seems to be going for a rather whimsical air. That’s fine at first. Vianne’s chocolate does seem to have some magical properties for a few folks, but then other times it doesn’t. Mostly, the whole thing comes down to whether Vianne’s free-spiritedness or Reynaud’s traditionalism will either prevail or somehow compromise.
And…I had a hard time caring one way or the other. There are no bad performances or anything, but everything seemed so incredibly low-stakes. Why is Reynaud getting this distraught over a chocolate shop? Is it about his control over the village or, as the end of the movie suggests, just his own control over himself? Is the movie magical or not? It’s not a children’s movie, and the low stakes would make more sense if it was, so what’s the point? For the life of me, the longer the light-hearted whimsy went on, the less I cared for it. The movie started off strongly enough, but by the time Depp showed up with his mystery accent (and he wasn’t the problem here), I had a hard time feeling much interest in the story. Reynaud is such a cartoonish evil antagonist, and the movie then has to deal with an abusive husband trying to win his wife back (unsuccessfully) in a plotline that seems like it came from a completely different movie, to say nothing about the other rifts that exist in the village that it seems even the finest chocolate can’t overcome.
So, maybe Jimmy Fallon was right.
Grade: C+
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