"Toast": Nigel Slater's Ax-Grinding Novel Dully Translated to Big Screen

Details

Opens Friday at Landmark Opera Plaza.

Related Content

• Before Rufus Wainwright's "Out of the Game": Top Five Music Videos Where Celebrities Lip-Synch
  April 5, 2012
• "The Art of Getting By": Teen Movies Don't Get More Boring Than This
  June 15, 2011
• Showcasing Oscar-Nominated Short Films 2011
  February 9, 2011
• You Say 'Tomato,' Barry Estabrook Says 'Labor Abuse,' at the Ferry Building Tonight
  August 15, 2011
• "The King's Speech": Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter humanize the House of Windsor
  December 8, 2010

More About

• Nigel
• Nigel Slater
• Wolverhampton
• Victoria Hamilton
• S.J. Clarkson

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Premiered as a BBC1 telefilm, now flaunting its wasteful widescreen in theaters, Toast adapts the autobiography of Nigel Slater, a popular British food writer looking back in condescension on the Midlands of his youth. The film begins in the middle-class Wolverhampton home where young Nigel is raised on a tinned-food diet by his asthmatic mum (Victoria Hamilton), a cook who could burn water, and his chronically indigested, owlish dad (Ken Stott). Nigel's only respite is the visits of a free-spirited young gardener in motorcycle leathers — the way Nigel gazes on his mentor gives us some inkling of the boy's nascent adult desires. When mum passes, she's replaced by Helena Bonham Carter's lower-class housekeeper, a gifted cook who seduces dad and competes for his affection through food preparation with Nigel, who has grown into a home economics prodigy. Oscar Kennedy and Freddie Highmore, respectively playing Nigel as an adolescent and teenager, are remarkably well-matched in lack of screen presence, if not in looks. Slater's book was evidently an ax-grinder, and the resulting film, directed with tone-deaf comic rhythm by S.J. Clarkson, shows pity and bemusement for the people raising Nigel but rarely human interest in them. More damning still, even the food looks ugly.