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Saturday, September 04, 2010
Must See
AND SHARE IT W/YOUR FRIENDS. This is a great documentary. And a great story. A woman named Wilma Stephenson in Philadelphia has transformed culinary arts into life arts. Her demanding program at Frankford High School habitually earns her students full and partial scholarships to college and to promising careers and lives. The movie follows her and her charges through a single school year, and it's the most inspiring and moving work of film I've seen in a long long time. Without being mawkish or even slightly sentimental -- the camera records the tears and triumphs but never lingers a moment too long -- Pressure Cooker simply observes a gifted, dedicated teacher in action and the extraordinary impact she has on the lives of the kids who sign up for her rigorous program. There is no voiceover narration, no interruption for interviews or encomiums. There's just the footage of what's going on, from her kitchen classroom sessions to school events to the home lives of her stressed but admirable proteges. It's completely extraordinary from beginning to end.
Forget what you think you know about urban life in cities like Philadelphia. There are no guns or gangs or crack houses here and none of the excuses that go with such cliches. Frankford is a poor neighborhood, and life is tough there, but it's not a wasteland. What we're privileged to watch is good kids from varying circumstances struggling not against society in general, but for their own individual dreams, however improbable. Wilma Stephenson is by turns a taskmaster, a cheerleader, a mother, a shrewd manipulator, and an indomitable force of love. Whatever the event, from football games to cheerleader competitions to the prom to graduation, she is invariably there, tirelessly there for her kids.
The pacing is masterful. You get to see enough, know enough about everyone, and the sphere of attention goes way beyond cooking class. But there's a building sense of real suspense as the graduating class moves toward a citywide competition that could award the best ones full-boat scholarships for all four years of college, even as they juggle the complicated and sometimes crushing demands at home with the need for disciplined, precise, perseverant study and practice.
Initially, the culinary emphasis seems somewhat trivial weighed against the burden of real life in Frankford, but you learn -- as the kids learn -- that success and failure in this realm are both obvious and subtle. There is a specific result at the end of the effort, and there's no grading on the curve about an omelette or a shaped cucumber salad. You do it right or it's a disaster. There's no "good enough" or "Congratulations for showing up." And there's an etiquette, a formality, about culinary competition -- attire just so, "Yes, chef, no, chef" to your judges, and you not only have to cook well, but you also have to perform cleanly at every step of the process. One of Wilma's students is a star defensive tackle on the football team with every expectation of receiving an athletic scholarship to college. You begin to appreciate the real depth of his character only when you watch him shave slices of cucumber with the intensity of a neurosurgeon. Then you connect it to the devotion with which he escorts his much younger sister to the school bus every day.
Like the movie, I refuse to preach about what the movie is really about. But I want everyone to see it. It's available as a rental through Netflix and, I'm guessing, other similar services. Do yourself a favor and find a way to watch it. You won't regret it. The denouement is as emotionally rewarding as anything you'll experience from a Hollywood blockbuster.
