Whenever I hear someone say that someone else is toast,
meaning he’s dead, fired, finished, kaput or has lost something
only less precious than his life or his job, I have a little mental
hiccup. It is a way of making light of serious things — nothing
wrong with that, of course, so long as they’re your own serious
things — or, less benignly, expressing one’s indifference to
things which are serious to others. Somehow it seemed to fit with
what we knew of Ted Turner when we heard some years ago that he had
fired his own son at a family dinner by telling him: “You’re
toast.” Rhetorically, it’s also confusing. Presumably the
expression derives from the fact that toast, like meat (stick a
fork in him), is something that’s “done,” but the pun leaves the
visual imagination grasping at airy nothing, since the image of
toast itself conveys no sense of loss or conclusion, let alone the
devastation the expression is often used to denote. Rather the
reverse. Toast is the ultimate comfort food.
Toast and marmalade for tea,
Sailing ships upon the sea
Aren’t lovelier than you.
Or so sang Tin Tin — no, not that one but the one-hit
wonder Australian group — 40 years ago. And that’s how toast is
treated in S.J. Clarkson’s movie, written by Lee Hall
(Billy
Elliott), called Toast. Set in
the British Midlands in the 1960s, the movie is meant to evoke the
period and the place, partly with a soundtrack laden with the
plaintive songs of Dusty Springfield and partly with continual
reminders of the dreadful British diet of that era. It’s because
there’s so little else that’s good to eat that, as the movie’s
nine-year-old hero and narrator, Nigel Slater (Oscar Kennedy),
tells us, you’ve got to love somebody who makes you
toast.
He’s talking about his mother (Victoria Hamilton), who is
pretty much incapable of making him anything else, in spite of all
the encouragement young Nigel can give to her unavailing efforts in
the kitchen. But mum is toast too, in the other sense. She’s got
some kind of lung condition that poor Nigel soon must realize is
going to shorten her life and his childhood. Once she’s gone, it’s
just him and his irascible dad (Ken Stott), a factory manager from
Wolverhampton, near Birmingham — a man whose bad temper (as his
son speculates) may be owing to the fact that he has hardly ever
had a decent meal. Nigel is the first to get the idea that dad’s
affections are to be wooed and won in the kitchen, but he soon
finds himself up against a formidable competitor in the shapely
form of Mrs. Potter (Helena Bonham Carter), who comes into the
house as the cleaning woman but is rapidly promoted to companion,
mistress, and wife. Obviously, it’s not just her cooking that Nigel
can’t compete with.
But the fact appears to have given him a lifelong
grievance. Mr. Slater is a popular food writer and TV personality
in Britain, and the memoir on which the movie is based seems to
have been written in answer to his fans’ urgent request. Tell us,
Nigel, how you got to be so interested in food. And so Nigel does.
But of course most of us who want to hear from him — if we do want
to hear from him — do so not out of any affection for or curiosity
about Nigel Slater. Most of us, at least in America, have never
heard of the guy. We watch because we suppose he has an engaging
human story to tell, and up to a point he does. In this he is
helped immeasurably on the screen by tremendous performances not
only from Miss Bonham-Carter, Mr. Stott, and young Master Kennedy
but also Freddy Highmore (of Finding
Neverland) as the teenage Nigel and a
brilliant young actor called Frasier Huckle as nine-year-old
Nigel’s best friend Warrel who almost steals the show. “Normal
families are over-rated,” he tells Nigel consolingly. “You will
probably grow up to be interesting.”
Doubtless he did. But the movie ends up leaving a bad
taste in the mouth — and not only on account of Mr. Highmore’s gay
kiss with a character introduced solely for that purpose. We
probably could have guessed that the boy was going to grow up to be
gay, as well as interesting, but the subject is only brought up in
this way in order to be dropped again. It’s as if he wants to tell
us: forget about love. Let’s get back to the movie’s real subject,
which is hate. The narrative dynamic of this kind of movie requires
that its portrait of Mrs. Potter should be an affectionate, if not
uncritical one. It’s not. Quite the reverse. Nigel Slater’s hatred
for his step-mother has obviously festered for forty years and
comes out scalding on the screen.
Well, she regarded him as a rival for his father’s
affections, which of course he was, and she warned him to stay off
her “patch” in the kitchen. But what he really can’t forgive is
that she was “common,” as his beloved mother would have said. As
common as a pork pie. Actually, it’s her commonness, among other
things, which makes Mrs. Potter interesting and even lovable to me,
and there is great poignancy at the end when she desperately tries
to win Nigel’s affection, as she has won his father’s, in the only
way she knows how. In the kitchen. This gives him the opportunity
for a mean-spirited little triumph by spurning her from him.
Today’s superchef can now claim that the kitchen is his
patch. Nice for him, I guess, but not so nice for us. That after
all these years later she is still nothing but hateful to Mr.
Slater — and, through him, to Messrs. Hall and Clarkson who would
have us feel the same — amounts to an emotional contradiction at
the heart of the movie from which it cannot recover. Mrs. Potter is
toast, but then so is much of our sympathy for Nigel, or so it
seems to me.
