Review by Peter Veugelaers

Scene one has Chef Kate (Zeta-Jones) describing her delectable mouth-watering delicacies to her therapist (Balaban). Oh for the gloriousness of gourmet food. There’s plenty of it in this movie. Diced, split, and photographed in action on the dicing board from the kitchen of a high class New York restaurant where advertising executives dine and premiere chefs eye to work with the top brass. Food designing becomes a metaphor for Kate’s life of perfection and precision, the layers of which are chipped away.

Kate’s boss Paula (Clarkson) sent her to the therapist. Work is her life and Kate gets too sensitive about complaints over her usually respected work in the kitchen. Kate is guarded with her emotions. When her sister dies in a car accident, leaving her niece (Breslin) behind, Kate takes over the parenting of the child. That becomes part of Kate’s transition. Here there are domestication intimacies, albeit with some flat dramatic effect.

During a week off, enter Nick (Eckhart), whose started work in the same restaurant as Kate’s. The two don’t fire on all cylinders at first. She’s a rules bound chef through sheer experience on the job and doesn’t connect with his casual approach by singing Pavarotti during cooking. We’ve seen this before: opposites attract particularly in Hollywood movie lore where clearly defined characters rub each other up the wrong way and for good reason.

Although Zeta Jones and Eckhart don’t fire chemistry together – sometimes she looks as bored in the few tame love scenes as how stupefied her character’s written – Kate is a person dicing with change. It’s here that the movie works: finding a meaningful life away from pretension, artifice and superficiality painted with a lightweight, pleasing brush.