In 1887, Lord Acton wrote the now-famous line “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Robert A. Caro, who has written and researched extensively around the dynamics of power doesn’t think that axiom still works. In his book Passage of Power, he wrote “I don’t believe its always true any more… What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals… When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do”.
And Power is what the film The Kitchen (dir. Andrea Berloff) is all about. It follows three women living in the infamous Hell’s Kitchen in the late ’70s when their mobster husbands are sent to jail they have to take over the business to survive. It examines their struggle to find their own power, their challenges to get power, and the hardest of all, to maintain that power.
Melissa McCarthy leads the stellar cast as Kathy, the smart yet reserved protagonist. Elisabeth Moss (Claire) and Tiffany Haddish (Ruby) round out the terrific trio that carries the film. Kathy has the most idyllic of the three relationships with her husband appearing to at least like her. The other two exist within different but harmful relationships, Claire’s husband is physically abusive and Ruby’s husband is cheating on her. We are told by everyone that Kathy is really smart so when the husbands are arrested and sent away she makes a play at controlling the streets.
The film plays out as you would expect where the women learn to overcome their flaws and gain control over parts of their lives that were out of control. As they gain more and more power, this newfound courage plays out in different ways. For instance, Claire who was frail and afraid jump into the violence with gusto, eagerly learning how to chop up a dead body.
The whole film plays out pretty formulaically, just this time instead of it being an outside group that takes control of the neighbour its three women. It did nothing to reinvigorate the crime/mobster genre, this could have been that there were so many characters to follow that none of them got adequate time to really interrogate the meaning of power in their lives.
The themes were only tangentially touched upon so when the big reveal happens it doesn’t feel earned. It was an average story elevated by a fantastic cast. So the only axiom you can take away from this movie about power is the power of casting which they say is 90% of directing.
29 August 2019
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe