Entertainment
'La Cocina' raises the heat on kitchen power dynamics. It's where Rooney Mara wants to be
I spent 7 years working as a cashier (and as a cook when needed) at a fast-food establishment in Southeast Los Angeles before DACA allowed for other options. It was with a crew of mostly other undocumented people like myself that I shared frustrations and small triumphs alike one late night after another for minimum wage. Beholden to the ticket machine incessantly spitting out orders, we moved at superhuman speed.
The same mechanical monster taunts the staff at the Grill, the fictional Times Square restaurant at the center of Mexican writer-director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ “La Cocina,” a black-and-white reimagining of British author Arnold Wesker’s 1957 play “The Kitchen.”
Almost 70 years after its initial performances, the drama’s warning about prioritizing productivity above humanity remains dishearteningly relevant in our current vicious reality. In theaters Friday, “La Cocina” captures the superficial camaraderie forged in high-pressure jobs where people rely on each other to make it through the day, as well as the dynamics of power in an economic system that thrives on exploiting the most vulnerable — the unseen.
Set in an atemporal New York City (phone booths and old computers coexist alongside more modern references), Ruizpalacios’ adaptation turns the protagonist, Peter, a German in the post-WWII era, into Pedro (Raúl Briones), a rage-fueled Mexican immigrant from Puebla. His brash personality has earned him the respect and scorn of his co-workers in equal measures.
When money from the register goes missing, Pedro becomes a prime suspect. The amount curiously matches the exact cost of the abortion he reluctantly agrees to pay for when his waitress girlfriend Julia (Rooney Mara) reveals she is pregnant.
Rooney Mara and Raúl Briones in the movie “La Cocina.”
(Willa)
An investigation gets underway amid the daily catastrophes typical of any intense food-service environment (loss of tempers, crying in frustration). Here the strong abuse the weak. It’s a microcosm of the world and its vices, and not only because the sounds of several languages permeate the steamy premises.
Ruizpalacios first read “The Kitchen” while studying acting in London in the 2000s. At the time, he worked at the kitschy Rainforest Café in Piccadilly Circus — a now-defunct theme restaurant with animatronic animals — to help pay for his tuition. His fascination with kitchens and their rhythms came from that firsthand experience.
From those days, Ruizpalacios remembers a French Algerian co-worker named Samira, the only woman in the kitchen and a tough salt-of-the-earth motherly figure. A character directly inspired by Samira (and named after her) appears in “La Cocina.”
“She was very demanding and took no s—, but when s— hit the fan, she would be the only person to lend you a helping hand,” Ruizpalacios, 47, recalls on Zoom from his home in Mexico City. “She would always say, ‘Come on, Mexican, come on. Where are you?’”
With no connection to Rooney Mara but a conviction that she would be ideal for the role of Julia, a bold Ruizpalacios wrote her a letter detailing why she should take a risk and go down to Mexico City to make an indie movie with a group of mostly unknown actors.
“Pedro sees Julia as a sort of movie star,” says Ruizpalacios. “I knew casting someone like Rooney, who is well-known and has that movie-star aura, would add to the relationship.” It was the juxtaposition of Mara’s potent, sinewy turn in “The Girl with Dragon Tattoo” and the nuanced fragility she exuded in “Carol” that confirmed his admiration for her performances.
To his surprise, Mara responded positively to his “message in a bottle at sea.”
“I haven’t really done real theater as an adult, but it felt very close to that because we were doing these long, full takes and there was so much energy,” says Mara of Ruizpalacios’ working methods.
(Marcus Ubungen / Los Angeles Times)
“I’ve read quite a few of them and it’s always really nice to get a letter like that, but I wouldn’t say that they’re always necessarily very effective,” Mara, 39, tells me on a video call from her home in Los Angeles, dressed in a plain gray T-shirt with her hair tied up in a half-ponytail. “But there was something poetic about his letter that really touched me and made me very curious about him and about his script.”
Mara requested Ruizpalacios’ previous films (he sent her his two acclaimed Mexico City-set breakthroughs, 2014’s coming-of-age dramedy “Güeros” and 2018’s heist movie “Museo”), and soon after she agreed to star in “La Cocina.”
“My time is very precious now that I have kids,” Mara says. “To me now, the experience is so important. I’m like: Is this going to be a worthwhile experience? Is it something I can grow from? And everything about the way Alonso wanted to make the film to me was like, ‘Yes, this is an experience I’d like to have.’ It seemed different than anything I had done thus far.”
Back in 2010, Ruizpalacios directed a stage version of “The Kitchen.” Briones, then a student of Ruizpalacios’ acting courses, had a much smaller role as the immigrant restaurant owner demanding his missing funds, and later as a vagabond who wanders into the kitchen. “Pedro exists between these two archetypes: the immigrant who made it and the pariah,” the actor says on the phone from Mexico City. “He’s fighting to be the master of his own life.”
But despite having worked with Briones over the years, including in his previous film, 2021’s docufiction “A Cop Movie,” the director didn’t immediately cast the actor as Pedro. His hesitation came from knowing Briones didn’t speak English, a requirement for the part.
“One of his greatest qualities as an actor is his discipline,” Ruizpalacios says of Briones.
“Kitchens are very much like a pirate ship and the way we designed and conceived our kitchen was also like a submarine,” says Ruizpalacios.
(Marcus Ubungen / Los Angeles Times)
The actor learned the foreign tongue well enough to hold his own in multiple scenes with Mara in just three months. “I would challenge anyone to dominate another language in that time and feel comfortable enough to act in it,” Ruizpalacios says about his lead’s commitment.
For Briones, learning English — even in the movie’s limited capacity — had an empowering effect. In Mexico, those who grow up attending public schools, as was his case, don’t have access to a bilingual education. For a long time, Briones refused to speak or learn the language as a self-defense mechanism against the mockery he’d experience from others.
“Pedro has been a great teacher for me,” Briones says of his bilingual character who can advocate for himself. “Pedro’s obsession with speaking English has a survival reason, and my decision to not speak it did as well.” When presented with the opportunity to play the lead, Briones took a more technical approach to learning English with the help of fellow “La Cocina” actor María Fernanda Bosque, who served as his impromptu coach.
Exteriors for “La Cocina” were shot on location in New York City (around Times Square including Junior’s Restaurant & Bakery as the front of the Grill), but for the kitchen itself, Ruizpalacios wanted to play in his home turf. The director had long dreamed of working at Mexico City’s famed Estudios Churubusco, the soundstages where many classics from the national cinema’s Golden Age were made. This also allowed for more control over the design of the kitchen.
“Kitchens are very much like a pirate ship and the way we designed and conceived our kitchen was also like a submarine,” Ruizpalacios says. And since kitchens tend to be male-dominated spaces, the director hired a traditional all-male Welsh choir to sing the lyrics to the Mexican song “Un Puño de Tierra” (A Fistful of Dirt) translated into Welsh on top of music by composer Tomás Barreiro. The existentialist lyrics speak about the futility of material pursuits.
The track comes on during Pedro’s most emotionally charged moments: when he looks at the pictures of his family (they’re photos from Briones’ actual childhood) and when he calls his mother back home (the person who answers is Briones’ own mother).
“That song became the beating heart of the film,” says Ruizpalacios.
For the rehearsal process Ruizpalacios brought together his cast, with the exception of Mara, in Mexico City for a month. In the mornings they all took cooking classes and in the afternoons they participated in improvisation exercises to build a natural rapport. Though she regrets missing it, Mara believes that ultimately being absent from the in-person preparation aligned with her character’s position as an outsider.
“There are times where I’ve made decisions and done things that I probably shouldn’t have,” says Mara. “[There’s] a time in your life where you just want to work because you don’t want to be in your life. And then in the last six years I’ve barely worked at all.”
(Marcus Ubungen / Los Angeles Times)
“When you become a parent, there’s a carefree part of your life that no longer exists,” says Mara. “My character is a mom, and that’s the thing that separates her from her co-workers.”
Over time, prioritizing her children has made Mara herself increasingly selective. “There are times where I’ve made decisions and done things that I probably shouldn’t have,” Mara says. “[There’s] a time in your life where you just want to work because you don’t want to be in your life. And then in the last six years I’ve barely worked at all. I’ve done, like, two things.” (Those two things were Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” and Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking.” Mara knows how to pick them.)
“La Cocina” consistently proved to be an invigorating escape for her. One of the most technical astounding sequences takes place during a lunch rush. The kitchen turns into a madhouse with cooks working and waitresses fighting to get their orders out first, all while the floor is flooded with soda.
“We shot it over several days, and it was very much like a choreographed dance,” recalls Mara. “I haven’t really done real theater as an adult, but it felt very close to that because we were doing these long, full takes and there was so much energy.”
The sequence emerged from one of Ruizpalacios’ personal memories. On Christmas Eve in New York City 13 years ago, the director and his wife, actor Ilse Salas, visited a Times Square multiplex. When buying concessions, he realized the carpet was drenched. The liquid was coming from a broken Cherry Coke machine “spilling like an endless spring,” he recalls, as if coming from “the center of the Earth.”
“Nobody paid any attention to it,” he recalls. “It just kept pouring and flooding the whole place. And the people just kept working, ignoring it. I thought that was the perfect image of late-capitalism.” The couple watched “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” starring Mara. “I said to my wife, ‘One day I’m going to work with her,’ so this movie closed that circle.”
With the help of the Mexican Coalition, an organization that supports immigrant families, Ruizpalacios interviewed several undocumented kitchen workers in New York City about their daily experiences. Those interactions were essential to his research and writing process.“Listening to them you realize that no one has ever asked them about their story,” says Ruizpalacios.
“Mexicans are considered great workers around the world and that’s very positive, but it is also due to the fact that we are obedient and being obedient is very convenient to the system,” Briones says. “Pedro is not obedient. Disobedience is revolutionary.”
For the U.S. release of “La Cocina,” the distributor Willa partnered with One Fair Wage, a restaurant workers’ advocacy group, to present a series of screenings and events. Recently, a video presentation featuring clips from the film with documentary footage of NYC restaurant workers was shown on the enormous curved NASDAQ billboard in Times Square. Ruizpalacios always had this kind of visibility in mind for the men and women who sacrifice their physical and mental well-being to provide a service that most take for granted.
“In ‘La Cocina’ we don’t care about the customers,” he says. “This time they are the extras. That is the point of the film.”
Movie Reviews
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man review – Tommy Shelby returns for muddy, bloody big-screen showdown
After six TV series from 2013 to 2022, which caused a worrying surge in flat cap-wearing among well-to-do men in country pubs, Peaky Blinders is now getting a hefty standalone feature film, a muscular picture swamped in mud and blood. This is the movie version of Steven Knight’s global small-screen hit, based on the real-life gangs that swaggered through Birmingham from Victorian times until well into the 20th century. Cillian Murphy returns with his uniquely unsettling, almost sightless stare as Tommy Shelby, family chieftain of a Romani-traveller gang, a man who has converted his trauma in the trenches of the first world war into a ruthless determination to survive and rule.
As we join the story some years after the curtain last came down, it is 1940, Britain’s darkest hour and Tommy is the crime-lion in winter. He now lives in a huge, remote mansion, far from the Birmingham crime scene he did so much to create, alone except for his henchman Johnny Dogs, played by Packy Lee. Evidently wearied and sickened by it all, Tommy is haunted by his ghosts and demons: memories of his late brother, Arthur, and dead daughter, Ruby, and working on what will be his definitive autobiography. (Sadly, we don’t get any scenes of Tommy having lunch with a drawling London publisher or agent.)
But a charismatic and beautiful woman, played by Rebecca Ferguson, brings Tommy news of what we already know: his malign idiot son Erasmus Shelby, played by Barry Keoghan, is now running the Peaky Blinders, a new gen-Z-style group of flatcappers raiding government armouries for guns that should really belong to the military. And if that wasn’t disloyal and unpatriotic enough, Erasmus has accepted a secret offer from a sinister Nazi fifth-columnist called Beckett, played by Tim Roth, to help distribute counterfeit currency which will destroy the economy and make Blighty easier to invade. Doesn’t Erasmus know what Adolf Hitler is going to do to his own Romani people? (To be fair to Erasmus, a lot of the poshest and most well-connected people in the land didn’t either.)
Clearly, Tommy is going to have to come down there and sort this mess out. And we get a very ripe scene in which soft-spoken Tommy turns up in the pub full of raucous idiots who cheek him. “Who the faaaaaack is ‘Tommy Shelby’?” sneers one lairy squaddie, who gets horribly schooled on that very subject.
In this movie, Tommy Shelby is against the Nazis, and he can’t get to be more of a good guy than that. (Tommy has evidently put behind him memories of Winston Churchill from the first two series, when Churchill was dead set on clamping down on the Peaky Blinders.) The war and the Nazis are a big theme for a big-screen treatment and screenwriter Knight and director Tom Harper put it across with some gusto as a kind of homefront war film, helped by their effortlessly watchable lead. Maybe you have to be fully invested in the TV show to really like it, although this canonisation of Tommy is a sentimental treatment of what we actually know of crime gangs in the second world war. Nevertheless, it is a resoundingly confident drama.
Running free during a game of catch on the empty field at SoFi Stadium is a fantasy most Angelenos will never experience. For comedians Jo Koy and Gabriel Iglesias, it’s just a warm-up to a dream that’s been a lifetime in the making.
Gripping the football with fingers covered in Filipino tribal tattoos extending in a sleeve up his arm, Koy looks across the expanse of emerald green turf at his son jogging toward the south end zone of the Inglewood stadium on a recent afternoon. “To be able to throw at SoFi is crazy,” Koy said with a sparkling grin of bright white veneers.
The 54-year-old comedian with a beard full of gray stubble drops back to pass, launching a tight spiral underneath SoFi’s massive technicolor halo scoreboard hovering above a sea of empty stands. Joseph Jr. — a wiry 22-year-old with a head full of curly dark brown hair — runs briskly toward the goal line with a black cast on his left arm. He raises his right arm just in time to scoop it into his chest for a touchdown. The imaginary crowd goes wild.
“Yes!!!” Koy shouts, his excitement echoing in the stadium. He jogs over to Joseph in his navy blue coverall jumpsuit and L.A. Dodgers cap to deliver a satisfying father-son chest bump.
A few yards away, Iglesias is watching Roka, his tiny black chihuahua, dart around the field like four pounds of rambunctious entitlement. The plus-sized comedian — better known as “Fluffy” — is sporting his typical loose-fitting vintage Hawaiian shirt, denim shorts and black flat cap. Whenever they stand together, the duo’s dynamic is like a modern-day Laurel and Hardy.
Nearly 70% of tickets for Koy and Iglesias’ SoFi show sold within days, making this the largest stadium stand-up performance to date.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
“The fact that we’ve known each other as long as we have is wild … we’ve known each other since we both had hair,” Iglesias, 49, says as they both lift up their caps in unison, laughing and exposing their shiny bald heads.
On March 21, this stadium will be filled with more than 70,000 guests as the pair takes center stage at the Super Bowl of comedy — the largest stadium stand-up show to date. Koy and Iglesias are now part of a small fraternity of comics, including Kevin Hart, Dane Cook, Bill Burr and Larry the Cable Guy, who’ve sold out stadiums across the country.
The one-night-only show, which won’t be televised or recorded as a special, is meant to be one giant party for comedy fans who’ve supported Koy and Iglesias since their early days. The comics will be passing the mic back and forth throughout the night, which will feature special guests, surprise moments and plenty of other unplanned interruptions that will make for a roughly four-hour show. Though the L.A. comedy scene tends to exist in the shadow of Hollywood, this feat managed by two of its biggest names puts a historic spotlight on stand-up.
“It’s more sweet because it’s taken so long,” Iglesias said. “This wasn’t an overnight thing. Nowadays, everybody wants everything so fast. Between the two of us, we’ve got about 60 years of comedy experience.”
“It’s insane. I can’t explain it,” Koy adds, staring up at the stadium’s glass roof, preparing to crack it with decibels of laughter. “Every time we come in here and look up, I’m like, ‘There’s going to be a stage here the size of the end zone.’ We took the stage from the arenas that we normally play and injected steroids into it.”
For comedians who’ve witnessed their ascent, which now literally includes hands and feet cemented in front of TCL Chinese Theatre and a star for Fluffy on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the journey has been incredible to watch.
“It’s huge for stand-up, it used to be just in dingy clubs and bars and always something small and intimate and kinda like an afterthought,” said fellow comedy star Tiffany Haddish, a longtime friend to both Koy and Iglesias. “To be honest I never thought comedy would be this big.”
Jay Leno, a confidant to Iglesias and the man who inspired him to start his own insane car collection and offered Koy his first late-night appearance on “The Tonight Show,” agrees that a show like this is a huge step for comedy.
“My attitude when I came to this town was if you can’t get in through the front door, go in the back door,” Leno said. “And they didn’t do it the traditional way, they got to where they are as comedians, one audience member at a time.”
For the two L.A. comedians, the historic milestone represents decades of work and signals comedy’s arrival in mainstream entertainment venues.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
When the pair of arena-selling comics announced last year they’d be joining forces to perform at SoFi, the task of filling the massive concert venue and football stadium seemed laughable. But within a week, it clearly wasn’t a joke. Nearly 70% of the tickets were sold just days after going on sale. Now, weeks before the gig, the show is completely sold out with more seats being added. If there’s one person who is not necessarily surprised, it’s Iglesias. By his calculations — including his ability to sell out Dodger Stadium twice for the filming of his 2022 Netflix special, “Stadium Fluffy,” and Koy’s ability to sell out the Forum a record-setting six consecutive times (more than any other comedian) — the math checked out.
“At a certain point it’s like we’ve been doing [huge stand-up shows] for so many years, it becomes normal,” Iglesias said. “What do you do to change things? What do you do to grow? The worst thing that happens is it fails. But at least we know we tried it. Then we know what our ceiling is. But as of now, this isn’t the ceiling.”
Despite the logic, looking at the stadium’s massive seating chart during an initial meeting with the venue made the task feel akin to climbing Mt. Everest.
“SoFi is the size of like five Forums. That seating chart on a wall was the most discouraging thing I could possibly look at,” Koy said. “And then looking at the amount of money it was gonna cost us even before we sell one ticket. Me and Gabe should’ve been looking at that and been like, ‘What … are we thinking? Hell nah we ain’t doing this … !’”
It took more than a little convincing from Iglesias to get Koy on board. “[Jo] does not like change. I had to break down the math for him and I pushed it a lot,” Iglesias said. “And I’m glad we did because now that it’s sold out, the hard part is over. We just have to show up and deliver a kick-ass show. And then we can both celebrate after, crack a couple bottles and I know I’m taking a week off after that.”
Unlike a typical arena show, which takes several months to coordinate, their big night at SoFi required a full year of planning. The production and stage will be three times the size of the comedians’ normal stages and will be managed by the same team that produces stadium shows for acts like Los Bukis and Bad Bunny.
“It’s more sweet because it’s taken so long,” Iglesias said. “This wasn’t an overnight thing. Nowadays, everybody wants everything so fast. Between the two of us, we’ve got about 60 years of comedy experience.”
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
“It’s almost like a chessboard,” Iglesias said. “You got to do a bunch of moves in order to pull something like this off, it’s not just we’re gonna do it. This took a lot of planning, a lot of coordinating.”
When asked how the tickets could’ve possibly moved so fast, outside of typical avenues of good marketing and promotion, Koy says it was really comedy fans making a statement of support for them and for stand-up.
“There’s no such thing as marketing on this one, to me it’s a phenom,” he said, noting the pride both he and Iglesias have to see the excitement and support from local fans, especially Filipino and Latin communities across L.A. that have been a major part of their respective fanbases. “That type of reaction and that response to us saying we’re gonna be at SoFi is almost like a bragging right and it’s ‘our night, we’re gonna be there, I don’t care where we’re sitting.’”
The SoFi gig was conceived in February of 2024 during Koy’s sixth sold-out show at Kia Forum. In the hoopla of Koy breaking his own audience record at the venue, Iglesias crashed the show, presented his friend with a plaque and laid down the gauntlet in front of 17,500 fans. When Iglesias asked Koy if they should contemplate performing “across the street” together, the crowd erupted with excitement.
“Our agents and managers were like, ‘Are you sure you wanna do that?’’’ Iglesias said. “I think they missed a couple bonuses. But at the end of the day, it’s part of history.”
“That’s what’s beautiful about Gabe, he’s not scared to take on those big risks,” Koy said. “But the whole thing was a risk. We gotta alter our tour dates and sacrifice other opportunities to make this happen.”
“Every time we come in here and look up, I’m like, ‘There’s going to be a stage here the size of the end zone,‘” Koy said about the upcoming SoFi show on Mar. 21. “We took the stage from the arenas that we normally play and injected steroids into it.”
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
For Koy, a life of comedy was a risk inspired by his heroes while growing up in Tacoma, Wash. He traces it back to being 15 and seeing Eddie Murphy perform at Climate Pledge Arena during his “Raw” tour in Seattle. He remembers taking a panoramic look at the sold-out crowd roaring in the darkness before the leather-suited legend even took the stage. “I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, this guy got this many people in here?’ I just thought that was the most impossible thing,” Koy remembers. “And now I get to share this moment with my son and let him walk with me and let him see that this is possible.”
When Koy was moving up the comedy ranks under his real name Joseph Glenn Herbert, the thought of calling himself a comedian felt like a pipe dream. Koy, the son of a white father and Filipina mother, saw comedy as a way to channel an overactive personality and need to make people laugh into a career. Going from coffee shop open mics in Tacoma to clubs and casinos in Las Vegas in 1989, Koy scratched out a living doing random jobs to move to L.A. in 2001 with hopes of making it big.
Working at a bank or Nordstrom Rack offered some stability as he drove up and down Sunset Boulevard in his battered Honda Prelude with one broken headlight, looking for a way forward to pursue his passion. Haddish, his longtime friend, spent years working with Koy, who served as her mentor at the Laugh Factory. Between sets on stage, the two would often take breaks to fantasize about fame.
“Jo and I would sit outside of the Laugh Factory and have these conversations and we’d be eating hot dogs wrapped in bacon and we’d be dreaming about being in a big movie, playing big theaters and helping people heal through laughter,” Haddish said. “Now here we are.”
“At the end of the day, this is a big stamp. And I think it also lets other comics know, ‘Hey, man, step up your game. Let’s grow this,’” Iglesias said.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Pulling off a show of this magnitude is jaw-dropping to think about, Iglesias said, even after having achieved a similar feat just a few years ago at Dodgers Stadium where he filmed his special over the course of two shows. He also set a record for fines incurred by a performer for going over his allotted time slot (a hefty $250,000 for not leaving the venue until 4 a.m.). The SoFi gig leaves him only one shot to get it right. This time around, Iglesias feels infinitely less pressure despite the bigger venue.
“[Dodger Stadium] for me was grueling,” Iglesias said. “I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t know how it was gonna go. Every day we were pulling our hair out trying to figure it out. Fortunately we were still able to pull it off and we learned a lot from it. This time around, believe me when I tell you the stress of this show is not even there.”
Iglesias, a native of Long Beach, has spent over 30 years rising up the comedy ranks. Among his accomplishments are seven major comedy specials, a TV show (“Mr. Iglesias”) and becoming the first Mexican American comic with a top-grossing worldwide tour. Like Koy, who also has seven major specials, Iglesias went through a lot of metamorphosis on stage prior to finding his calling as a gregarious, fun-loving comedian with a penchant for doing cartoon-ish voices.
Leno says one of the key factors in Fluffy’s mass appeal is his likability.
“The great thing about Gabriel is that the kindness comes across, there’s not a mean spirit in his body,” he said. “There’s a lot of comics who are really funny but people don’t like them because they think they’re mean-spirited. … When you watch Gabe even when he does something that’s not fall-down hysterical, you smile because you like him. … I find him a joy to watch.”
Much of what Iglesias learned about marketing himself was inspired by the WWE. The costumes, witty banter and theatrics of the wrestling ring influenced his consistent look and even allowed the name “Fluffy” to become his calling card.
Comedians Gabriel Iglesias, aka, “Fluffy,” in front, and Jo Koy are photographed at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood on February 10, 2026, ahead of their March 21st show.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
“There is a certain level of pandemonium, as they say in wrestling, that’s needed to get people excited,” Iglesias said. “Then there’s the marketing and the way that you do it — so I did study wrestling a lot.”
Handing the kingdom of SoFi over to the court jesters for a night is a feat worthy of celebration.
“At the end of the day, this is a big stamp. And I think it also lets other comics know, ‘Hey, man, step up your game. Let’s grow this,’” Iglesias said. “And it’s not, ‘Step up your game,’ like we’re competing with each other. It’s more so like, ‘Let’s elevate the game of comedy.’”
Right now Koy feels plenty elevated, as though he’s floating every time he enters the stadium and looks up at the stands — like the night he saw Eddie Murphy all those years ago.
“You should’ve heard the whispers me and Gabe had to ourselves walking out of the stadium tunnel, like, ‘Yo, is this really happening?!’” Koy said with a megawatt smile. “Coming from an open mic night at a coffee house, never in my wildest dreams did I say, ‘Someday, a football stadium’ … we’re literally living our dreams right now.”
That’s both a promise and a challenge she delivers, since what follows may rub some viewers the wrong way. Yet Gyllenhaal’s full-throttle commitment to her vision is compelling in and of itself, and she has marshalled an absolutely smashing-looking and -sounding production. The story proper begins in 1936 Chicago, which, like everything and everyplace else in the movie, has been luminously shot by cinematographer Lawrence Sher and sumptuously conjured by production designer Karen Murphy. Her involvement is appropriate given that her previous credits include Bradley Cooper’s A STAR IS BORN and Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS, since among other things, THE BRIDE! is a nostalgic musical. Its Frankenstein (Christian Bale), who has taken the name of his maker, is obsessed with big-screen tuners, and imagines himself in elaborate song-and-dance numbers. (Considering the reception to JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX, one must applaud the daring of Warner Bros. for greenlighting another expensive film in which a tormented protagonist has that kind of fantasy life.)
THE BRIDE! may be revisionist on many levels, but its characterization of its “monster” holds true to past screen incarnations from Karloff’s to Elordi’s: His scarred appearance masks a lonely soul who desires companionship. Frankenstein has arrived in Chicago to seek out Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening), correctly believing she has the scientific know-how to create an appropriate mate for him. Rather than piece one together, Dr. Euphronious resurrects the corpse of Ida (Jessie Buckley), whose consorting with underworld types led to her brutal death. Previously chafing against the man’s world she inhabited in life, she becomes even more defiant and unruly as a revenant, apparently possessed by the spirit of Shelley herself, declaiming in free-associative sentences and quoting rebellious literature.
Buckley, currently an Oscar favorite for her very different literary-inspired role in HAMNET, tears into the role of the Bride (who now goes by the name Penny) with invigorating abandon that bursts off the screen. Unsure of her identity yet overflowing with self-confident bravado, she’s the opposite of the sensitive “Frank,” but they’re united by the world that stands against them. That becomes literal when a violent incident sends them on the lam, road-tripping to New York City and beyond, on a trail inspired by the films of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), Frank’s favorite song-and-dance-man star.
With THE BRIDE!, Gyllenhaal has made a film that’s at once her very own and a feverish homage to all sorts of cinema past and present. It’s a horror story, a lovers-on-the-run movie, a crime thriller, a musical and more, and historical fealty be damned if it makes for a good scene (as when Penny and Frank sneak into a 3D movie over a decade before such features became popular). In-references are everywhere: It might just be a coincidence that the couple’s travels take them past Fredonia, NY (cf. “Freedonia” in the Marx Brothers’ DUCK SOUP), but it’s certainly no accident that the former Ida is targeted by a crime boss named Lupino, referencing the actress and pioneering filmmaker whose works included noirs and women’s-issues stories. Penny’s exploits lead legions of admiring women to adopt her look and anarchic attitude, echoing the first JOKER (while a headline calls them “Twisted Sisters”), and the use of one Irving Berlin song in a Frankensteinian context immediately recalls a classic comedic take on the property.
Whether the audience should be put in mind of a spoof at a key point in a film with different goals is another matter. At times like these, Gyllenhaal’s pastiche ambitions overtake emotional investment in the story. As strong as the two lead performances are (Bale is quite moving, conveying a great deal of soul from behind his extensive prosthetics), it’s easier to feel for them in individual scenes than during the entire course of the just-over-two-hour running time. The diversions can be entertaining, to be sure, but they also result in an uncertainty of tone. The dissonance continues straight through to the end, where the filmmaker’s choice of closing-credits song once again suggests we’re not supposed to take all this too seriously.
There’s nonetheless much to admire and enjoy about THE BRIDE!, and this kind of risk-taking by a major studio is always to be encouraged (especially considering that we’ll see how long that lasts at Warner Bros. once Paramount takes it over). Beyond the terrific work by the aforementioned actors, there’s fine support from Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz as detectives on Penny and Frank’s heels, with Sandy Powell’s lavish costumes and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s rich, varied score vital to fashioning this fully imagined world. Kudos also to makeup and prosthetics designer Nadia Stacey and to Chris Gallaher and Scott Stoddard, who did those honors on Frank, for their visceral, evocative work. Uneven as it may be, THE BRIDE! is also as alive! as any film you’ll likely see this year.
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