Beginning
with a Broadway Danny Rose roundtable chin session and
climaxing with a seizure of unlikely but cathartic wiseguy
retribution, Bob Giraldi’s DINNER RUSH stakes out its
downtown territory with surgical precision. Set almost
entirely inside a busy, upscale Tribeca eatery, the movie
is an impressively deft re-creation of a familiar space,
complete with industrial decor, hectic kitchen chaos,
track-lighting faux pas, and a population of
self-obsessed, hyper-sophisticated bullshit artists.
Visual naturalism is Amerindie’s largest oversight, but
Giraldi and cinematographer Tim Ives achieve a
budget-defying degree of Altman-style weave-and-smush.
As the
film’s evening presses on, tension mounts, merely by
virtue of the restaurant’s everyday attempts to avoid
collapsing into mayhem while concocting white-truffle this
and lemongrass that. But Giraldi (a 25-year vet of
commercials and music videos) and his scriptwriters work
in a few strands of melodrama for good measure. The
old-school owner, Louis (Danny Aiello)—who cannot
tolerate the insubstantial pretensions his ambitious
superstar-chef son, Udo (Edoardo Ballerini), puts on the
menu—is trying to quit a bookmaking side-business that
got his partner killed. The piddling Queens mobsters
responsible for the hit (Mike McGlone and Alex Corrado)
station themselves at a balcony table, waiting until the
lovable sous chef Duncan (Kirk Acevedo) pays off his huge
gambling debt or Louis makes them co-owners. Giraldi folds
in at least 10 other characters, from a trivia-spouting
Brit barkeep to Sandra Bernhard’s gargoyle food critic,
all so confidently sketched they seem to be in constant
motion doing their jobs even when offscreen.
Michael
Atkinson