In the Flesh: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

It’s a rare scene in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover in which Michael Gambon isn’t talking. “Talking” doesn’t do it justice, really. He rants. He bullies. He declaims and hectors, gibbers and bellows and froths. A quick once-over of the screenplay reveals the obvious: he talks more than every other character in the film taken together. It wouldn’t be appropriate to call his performance as Albert Spica, a local crime boss who fancies himself a gourmand and has muscled his way into partnership in a fine French restaurant, a pleasure. It’s a tide of bile, a noxious stew of insecurity, stupidity, cruelty, paranoia, and ignorance and it never, ever ceases in its unrelenting assault on the ears. Watching the film’s other characters try to summon the willpower to remain engaged in listening to his blathering out of fear that failure could get them brutalized, raped, or even killed is a singular experience. It evokes the ghoulish, relentless tension of ‘It’s a Good Life’, in which a young boy with psychic powers subjects an entire town to his inane whims. Spica is that perfect species of monster, just smart enough to realize he’s stupid, and that his power therefore depends on domination and unpredictable violence.

Physically, Gambon leans into his broad shoulders and pugnacious features for the role, slouching and lurching from room to room like Frankenstein’s monster moving at 3x speed. He’s querulous, lower lip always out, pouchy eyes narrowed. He shows his upper gums when he sneers, a distinctly lower-class expression, and that class anxiety is present in his every word and action. He covets the aura of sophistication around chef Richard Boarst’s (Richard Bohringer) restaurant Le Hollandais, yet distrusts and mocks its unfamiliar menu, waffling between airy mispronunciation of French dishes and spiteful scorn meant to mask his insecurities as to the quality of his palate. The restaurant, like his well-bred wife Georgina (Helen Mirren) is a sort of phallic gourd of the sort Ancient Roman stage performers in a Priapic role would don to show their exaggerated sexual preoccupation and self-importance, a distraction from his origins and an expression of his beliefs pertaining to success and power.

Spica’s self-indulgent sentimentality crowns the role, and Gambon’s blubbering is second to none, red-eyed and childish, voice thick and resentful. “Who wants kids?” he sobs. “I want kids.” What he wants them for is an open and ugly question. We see him drag the kitchen boy Pup (Paul Russell) into his sexual assault of his wife Georgina, ranting all the while about his and Georgina’s first sexual experiences — formative for him, he says, but not for his already experienced partner. Whatever hurts and horrors Spica harbors in his heart go with him to the grave, but there’s no need for the cheap trappings of backstory or established timelines. Gambon’s voice and body speak so loudly that by the film’s end, as Spica finally falls silent, the appalling outline of him is stamped forever on every viewer’s soul. There’s no wiping him off, no hosing yourself of the experience of seeing him dig deep down into that gibbering vein of banal evil. His constipated squawks of “button-eater, button-eater!” as he forces the aforementioned objects into Pup’s mouth are some of film’s most repellent line deliveries. He’s holding himself back, you realize with horror, channeling his impotent rage into this bizarre act of violence. What does he want to do in that moment? It’s a question the film never quite answers, and it haunts every line of his masterful turn.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, films like the one covered here wouldn't exist.