Vianne Rocher (Juliette Binoche) is a woman on a mission, opting to spend her life liberalizing the lives of the inhabitants of small French towns. Daughter in tow, she sets up chocolate shops and single-handedly brings down prudishness once her stodgy neighbors get a taste of her sweet, homemade chocolate delights. An opening voice-over reminds us that this is a fable and as long as the film stages its simple-minded tale within the confines of fairy tale devices it is mostly smooth sailing from there.
Lasse Hallstrom's mistake is that he bolsters his film's light-natured facade with a feeble attempt at giving the film a significantly serious moral thrust. It's the kind of plot that writes itself: conservative religious town finds the chocolate-peddling ways of the godless new citizen to be sacrilegious but by film's end everyone has learned to find that joy that lies within the cocoa seed. The film begins to take itself so seriously that one is forced to wonder if Hallstrom actually believes his material is controversial in nature.
Perhaps my general indifference to the film has something to do with my utter dislike for chocolate. Even though the substance always manages to look heavenly when glorified on the screen, I find it very hard to watch it portrayed as a potential aide to achieving sexual orgasm. Once Vianne's first customer manages to unlock the secret to her husband's long-repressed sex drive, via the chocolate truffles that soulfully correspond to her persona, all remaining townsfolk find themselves slowly submitting before Vianne's offerings.
It's never really clear why Vianne gets so upset when she is treated poorly by the town's citizens. In light of the fact that her work history is based on spreading the liberating love of chocolate throughout prudish towns, why would one town's hesitancy be anymore troubling than another's? The great Lena Olin plays a battered wife named Josephine Muscat who seeks refuge from her husband (Peter Stormare) in Vianne's shop, soon becoming Vianne's assistant. In what has to be one of the most unbelievable character arcs ever portrayed on screen, Hallstrom has us believe that Josephine is capable of going from kleptomaniac and paranoid schizophrenic to upstanding feminist at the snap of one's finger.
I have always viewed Alfred Molina as that special kind of actor who manages to creep into otherwise forgettable film projects when a director is itching for prestige, ala James Woods and Armin Mueller-Stahl. Molina has a meatier part in Chocolat then we usually see him in, playing the town's mayor and Vianne's moral opponent. He is the staunch supporter of uptight religiosity and makes it his mission to single-handedly drive Vianne out of the town. He's the savage beast that will undoubtedly be tamed by film's end.
Abortion was the hot-button issue in The Cider House Rules where Hallstrom wove a manipulative tale around Tobey Maguire's journey to pro-choice enlightenment. Here the issue is patriarchal religion and, although I am a proud agnostic, I find Hallstrom's approach to be condescending and trivializing, as if religiosity is inherently comical in it's staunch inhospitality, curable through a little bit of self-indulgence.
Binoche, bearing a striking resemblance to Julia Roberts in many of the film's scenes, is good in the film despite playing second fiddle to the chocolate that she hawks. Judi Dench is one of many actors with thankless parts, playing the role of the diabetes-afflicted martyr who opts to live her final days full of chocolate instead of insulin. The entire film is innocent in nature until it turn's manipulative when Johnny Depp's pirate character enters the scene and one is left to wonder if Hallstrom is going to have the entire town construct concentration camps in order to punish the undesirables. It's a film that takes itself entirely too seriously for a comedy and seems to beg that we be shocked by how scandalous it thinks it's being.
Lasse Hallstrom's mistake is that he bolsters his film's light-natured facade with a feeble attempt at giving the film a significantly serious moral thrust. It's the kind of plot that writes itself: conservative religious town finds the chocolate-peddling ways of the godless new citizen to be sacrilegious but by film's end everyone has learned to find that joy that lies within the cocoa seed. The film begins to take itself so seriously that one is forced to wonder if Hallstrom actually believes his material is controversial in nature.
Perhaps my general indifference to the film has something to do with my utter dislike for chocolate. Even though the substance always manages to look heavenly when glorified on the screen, I find it very hard to watch it portrayed as a potential aide to achieving sexual orgasm. Once Vianne's first customer manages to unlock the secret to her husband's long-repressed sex drive, via the chocolate truffles that soulfully correspond to her persona, all remaining townsfolk find themselves slowly submitting before Vianne's offerings.
It's never really clear why Vianne gets so upset when she is treated poorly by the town's citizens. In light of the fact that her work history is based on spreading the liberating love of chocolate throughout prudish towns, why would one town's hesitancy be anymore troubling than another's? The great Lena Olin plays a battered wife named Josephine Muscat who seeks refuge from her husband (Peter Stormare) in Vianne's shop, soon becoming Vianne's assistant. In what has to be one of the most unbelievable character arcs ever portrayed on screen, Hallstrom has us believe that Josephine is capable of going from kleptomaniac and paranoid schizophrenic to upstanding feminist at the snap of one's finger.
I have always viewed Alfred Molina as that special kind of actor who manages to creep into otherwise forgettable film projects when a director is itching for prestige, ala James Woods and Armin Mueller-Stahl. Molina has a meatier part in Chocolat then we usually see him in, playing the town's mayor and Vianne's moral opponent. He is the staunch supporter of uptight religiosity and makes it his mission to single-handedly drive Vianne out of the town. He's the savage beast that will undoubtedly be tamed by film's end.
Abortion was the hot-button issue in The Cider House Rules where Hallstrom wove a manipulative tale around Tobey Maguire's journey to pro-choice enlightenment. Here the issue is patriarchal religion and, although I am a proud agnostic, I find Hallstrom's approach to be condescending and trivializing, as if religiosity is inherently comical in it's staunch inhospitality, curable through a little bit of self-indulgence.
Binoche, bearing a striking resemblance to Julia Roberts in many of the film's scenes, is good in the film despite playing second fiddle to the chocolate that she hawks. Judi Dench is one of many actors with thankless parts, playing the role of the diabetes-afflicted martyr who opts to live her final days full of chocolate instead of insulin. The entire film is innocent in nature until it turn's manipulative when Johnny Depp's pirate character enters the scene and one is left to wonder if Hallstrom is going to have the entire town construct concentration camps in order to punish the undesirables. It's a film that takes itself entirely too seriously for a comedy and seems to beg that we be shocked by how scandalous it thinks it's being.