Like lemon meringue pie, “Toast” is sweet and tart [MOVIE REVIEW]
Tasty: Ken Stoat, Helena Bonham Carter, and Freddie Highmore in “Toast”
“No matter how bad things get, it’s impossible not to love someone who made you toast,” says Nigel Slater the internationally renowned food writer, whose memoir is the basis of the recently released British film “Toast.” “Once you’ve bitten through that crusty surface to the soft dough underneath and tasted the warm salty butter, you’re lost forever.” Allegorically speaking, this is the definition of young Nigel’s life.
Loving his Mum (the very warm Victoria Hamilton), and much beloved by her, Nigel (played as a boy by Oscar Kennedy and as a young man by Freddie Highmore) navigates a life of badly prepared tinned food, an art form in itself if you think about it, and one that is entirely devoid of fresh vegetables. Toast is the only food group that his mother has mastered. Knowing other families do not live this way, Nigel longs for normalcy. But as best friend points out, “Normal families are totally overrated. You’ll probably grow up to be interesting.”
Never in good health, his mother dies when he is still in grade school, and Nigel is left alone with his sour, uncommunicative father (Ken Stott). “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” advises his best friend; so Nigel begins to acquaint himself with the kitchen. But an interloper has lodged on his doorstep in the shapely form of the new cleaning woman, Mrs. Potter (a voluptuous Helena Bonham Carter). No matter the young age of our hero, even he recognizes a viable threat when first he spies her scrubbing the inside of cabinets wearing a form-fitting shift that creeps up above the tops of her thighs, bursting to be free of her seamed stockings, barely held in place by her garter belt.
Aware, even before his father, that the already married Mrs. Potter has her upwardly mobile eye on the elder Mr. Slater, it is a battle that Nigel cannot win, especially when the very “common” Mrs. Potter begins to cook for the family. No longer meals of overcooked canned meats and vegetables (and I am still uncertain as to how one overcooks canned food), she prepares Duck á l’Orange, marvelous beef stews, roast turkey, fresh whipped potatoes and scrumptious desserts. The advice one adult gives Nigel, recognizing that Mrs. Potter’s charms, base though they may be, will triumph, “If I were you, I’d just try to enjoy the food.”
But if food truly is the way to his father’s heart, then food it will be and the war is fully engaged when Nigel enrolls in his school’s home economics class and becomes expert. The insecure Mrs. Potter, by now Mrs. Slater, is truly threatened and, rather than allowing Nigel an entrée, instead conspires to lock him out entirely, eliminating any possible compromise and solidifying Nigel’s middle class prejudice against the lower class Joan Potter.
Adapted from Nigel Slater’s memoir by Lee Hall, most well known for the screenplay of “Billy Elliott,” as well as the book and lyrics of the current Broadway hit musical, and directed by SJ Clarkson, “Toast” never succumbs to cloying sentimentality. No character is flawless. That Nigel treats Mrs. Potter with such disdain is both a product of his prejudice and his loyalty to his mother; that his father is unable to fully communicate either his love for his first wife or his need for his second only fuels the fire of Nigel’s disdain. Mrs. Potter, blindly setting her sights on middle class respectability, is totally unprepared to understand the needs of a mourning adolescent and chooses a glacial war of attrition rather than risk competition for the affections of the father.
Toast opens tomorrow, October 7, at the Nuart Theater in Santa Monica, for one week only. Hurry and get there. Like Mrs. Potter’s lemon meringue pie, it’s sweet and tart; a delicious journey to take and one that will stay with you. (310) 281-8223 or go to LandmarkTheatres.com. ER