Note: as I was finishing this piece, the invasion of Israel by Hamas took place. War is never warranted, but this act was particularly heinous. Militants went from house to house in Southern Israel shooting families, kidnapping people, and over 100 civilians at a music festival were slaughtered. Women were abducted, raped, stripped naked, and paraded through the streets as onlookers chanted, “God is great.” While the reasoning behind Hamas’ attack is unclear at this moment, because of social media, the atrocities have been on display for all to witness. Israel’s military has begun to respond with full force, and Gaza will soon be flattened. Some will argue that Israel will go too far. Some will say Hamas “limited” its attacks to specific areas of Israel. It won’t matter. When Israelis are killed, kidnapped, and terrorized on this level, vengeance will be enacted.
As I say towards the end of this piece, no one likes to admit behavior like this is possible. How can people do these things to one another? The answer is simple. Driven to extremes, with backs up against walls, humans are capable of even the most barbaric acts. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is one of many works in a long line of artistic representations of our indifference towards one another. We’ve seen this represented on film, on stage (see Sarah Kane’s Blasted), and on television. It’s never pleasant to watch innocent people violated as they are in this film, but when you look at what’s happening in the world, you realize that artists like Peter Greenaway are holding up a mirror to what they see around them. The Cook, The Thief may technically be fiction, but the world it reflects is only too real.
Alan Howard, Richard Bohringer, Helen Mirren, and Michael Gambon as Michael, Richard, Georgina, and Albert in Peter Greenaway’s THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE, AND HER LOVER
Back in 1990, released from the bonds of collegiate servitude, I reveled in the joy of being able to see whatever movie I pleased. The freedom made me positively giddy, as I snuck off to see movies in the middle of the afternoon at some of DC and NY’s finest arthouses. With each new discovery, my love of the medium was solidified. I started keeping lists and making annual top tens. No one looked forward to the arrival of these lists more than me, with the possible exception of my former roommate Doug French, with whom I shared a film criticism website, Filmington, that featured these lists each year of its existence.
The #1 film of 1990 was Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.
I don’t remember what drew me to this film. I saw it in Boston with a college pal, Jon Higgins — but its effect on me and those around me was titanic. Not only because the film was a work of staggering genius, with sumptuous costumes, vibrant production design, and daring performances, but its score, by the great Michael Nyman, became the soundtrack to my life. Nyman’s music found its way onto the stereos of pretty much everyone involved in the Potomac Theater Project in summer 1991, if only because one of the directors utilized music (legally or otherwise) from the film in one of our productions. The Cook, The Thief soundtrack, as well as those from Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract, Drowning By Numbers, A Zed and Two Noughts, and Nyman’s own The Nose, wormed their way into heavy rotation on my personal listening device.
Michael Gambon as Dumbledore in HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE (2009)
The occasion of my revisiting this film owes much to the fact that Michael Gambon passed away September 27 at the age of 82. Gambon may be best known now for his role as Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, but to me he will always be Albert Spica, the gangster at the heart of this film.
The Cook, The Thief is Peter Greenaway’s most extravagant film, as well as his most traditionally plotted, with a bold, painterly palette and colors so rich you could sink into them. The main setting is a restaurant, Le Hollandais, which presents two halves of a whole. On one side is the kitchen, under the direction of master chef Richard Boarst (Richard Bohringer), its tables brimming with flora, fauna, and fowl, its workers furiously beating bowls of sauce and chopping vegetables, as a boy soprano belts Nyman’s mournful “Miserere.” On the other side is the dining room, a crimson world of Thatcherian excess where diners in extravagant dress come to feast upon Boarst’s imaginative cuisine. If the kitchen is where life plays out in all its messiness, the dining room is where life is snuffed out, shoved down the gullets of Boarst’s rich, fat patrons.
The plot is fairly simple — gangster’s wife falls for bookish restaurant patron, affair takes place, mayhem ensues — but the the production design (by Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs) and the costumes (by Jean Paul Gaultier) are anything but. The exterior of the restaurant, with its mammoth curtains, portals, and scaffolding, represent an incomplete world, one that is ruled by those that have no desire to make it a better place. The interior seems to spring simultaneously from Flash Gordon and a Frans Hals painting. In Greenaway’s vision, the worlds work in tandem. Costumes change color as settings change color, mirroring the ways in which characters move between worlds and inhabit them.
The performances of Alan Howard and Helen Mirren, as the Lover and Wife who spend much of the film in flagrante delicto, are astonishing. Then there’s Gambon, whose performance as ruthless gangster and relentless motormouth Spica, husband of Mirren’s Georgina, is the stuff of nightmare fuel. Up to that point, I’d only seen only one other film in which an actor appeared to be so out of control, he might do anything short of jumping off the screen. That was David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), in which Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth tormented Isabella Rossellini and Kyle MacLachlan in such extreme ways, I found myself wondering, “Was he directed to act this way, or…?”
Dennis Hopper in BLUE VELVET (1986)
Michael Gambon in THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE, AND HER LOVER (1989)
But Hopper was an actor synonymous with excess, with violence, alcohol, and drug use. “The Great Gambon” (as Ralph Richardson dubbed him) was a capital T Thespian who’d made a name for himself in productions of Brecht, Miller, Shakespeare, and Ayckbourn. In The Cook, The Thief, I realized just how far actor can go when they’re in control of their faculties. From the opening scene, in which Spica smears dog feces on a man’s body, then urinates on him, to the moment Spica tortures a young boy, to the end in which Spica exacts his revenge on The Lover, Gambon’s performance left me shaken, sick to my stomach.
Footnote: I was lucky enough to see Gambon onstage, in a production of David Hare’s Skylight at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre in 1996. He was, as always, brilliant. But as I was watching him, I couldn’t help but think, This is the guy who tortured that kid? (For what it’s worth, I also considered this while watching Gambon as Dumbledore — a nasty bit of cognitive dissonance, when you think about it.)
So is The Cook, The Thief horror? I’m saying Yes, absolutely. As savage and on-point as the film is in spit-roasting the excesses of 1980s England, it’s also a super tough watch that forces us to confront behavior we’d like to pretend isn’t possible (but as we’ve seen recently, is all too real). Characters are humiliated, carved up, force-fed, stabbed (with forks, no less), beaten, demeaned, and finally, consumed. And while much of the action of the film, like its settings, is deeply allegorical (there’s enough Christ symbolism to fill several dissertations), that doesn’t make it any less repellant. The Cook, The Thief is as shocking, disgusting, and alienating as it was when I first set eyes on it thirty-three years ago.
Eric Winick
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover was released on October 13, 1989 (UK) and April 6, 1990 (US). Writer/Director: Peter Greenaway. With Roger Ashton-Griffiths, Ian Dury, Richard Bohringer, Michael Gambon, Ciaran Hinds, Alan Howard, Alex Kingston, Helen Mirren, Paul Russell, Liz Smith, and Tim Roth.