There aren’t many Thanksgiving classics, but What’s Cooking? should be one of them.
Lionsgate
Lionsgate
You'll never get into a heated debate over the best Thanksgiving movie — there just aren't many memorable ones to choose from, much less to feel passionate about. Crowded traveling, scarfing turkey, and getting in boozy fights over politics with your uncle may all be part of the American experience, but that's apparently not enough to move someone to create a film. Thanksgiving is the start of the holiday season, but when it comes to inspiring movies, it's got nothing on Christmas.
Yes, there is the agreed-upon classic, the Steve Martin-John Candy comedy Planes, Trains & Automobiles, but the drop-off after that is steep. There are a few scrappier would-be standards that never quite made it, like Jodie Foster's Home for the Holidays and the Katie Holmes indie Pieces of April. Then there are the movies that use Thanksgiving gatherings as just another backdrop for ongoing drama, like The Ice Storm, Hannah and Her Sisters, The House of Yes, and The Myth of Fingerprints — which is fair enough, but not really about the holiday at all. Thanksgiving movies tend to conjure up images of chilly weather, repressed emotion, and, frequently, whiteness.
But as the child of immigrant parents growing up in California, my Thanksgivings were not filled with the stressful trekking and alcohol-induced political feuds — and Thanksgiving, in particular, shouldn't be presented as monolithic. As a secular, national tradition, it includes in its expansive embrace Americans of all kinds who are temporarily unified in their attempts to properly roast and devour a giant piece of poultry. Dubious origin story aside, there's a good case for Thanksgiving being the best holiday of the year, concerned only with the straightforward pleasures of getting together with people you like or love (or are obligated to spend time with anyway due to familial ties) and eating mountains of starchy food. It's deserving of a movie that celebrates its basic inclusiveness and gluttony, and so I submit for your Thanksgiving classic consideration the 2000 film What's Cooking?, directed by Gurinder Chadha.
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