Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Or, Tekka Piece of My Heart, Baby.

Amazon's description of this film is a meditation on work and perfection. I'm not really fond of the word meditation to describe a film–it seems to be code for this movie has no story and no structure, but it is sort of loosely about some big amorphous theme like love or loss or California or whatever. See here and here and here and here and here. And here and here and here. So to more comprehensively describe this movie, perhaps it should be called a meditation on work and perfection, with a short, preachy digression on overfishing. 

Jiro Ono owns a sushi restaurant located in a Tokyo subway station which has three Michelin stars. He has spent his entire life doing nothing but making sushi. The film would seem to say that this is the recipe for getting to the top of any field–endless, singleminded practice and dedication. It seems very Japanese, and at first it appears to be a lesson that we spastic Americans, changeable as the weather, unfocused and impetuous, could really use.

On the other hand, that's kind of the movie's biggest problem. There really is nothing to Jiro except sushi. He does, in fact, dream of sushi, and always has. He pontificates endlessly to camera, to the point where the film, with its heavily Philip Glass-infused score, begins to seem like a food-porn version of Errol Morris's The Fog of War.

The food photography is in fact sublime, and for a while, just watching the balletic preparation of the fish is enough. But even that wears thin, and the tiny restaurant begins to seem claustrophobic. As if it realizes this, the film leaves the restaurant and begins to meander, meditating endlessly on every aspect of sushi. It heads out to the fish market to chat with the fish vendors, who have nothing much interesting to say–their secret is nothing more and nothing less than a relentless, lifelong search for quality. We learn about the extra pressure on the rice, the massaging of the octopus, the difficulty of cooking the egg. Thankfully the film spares us the exquisite care with which the apprentices wash the pots, or the exquisitely choreographed bathroom breaks.

The film goes home with Jiro to the small town where he grew up, where the quality of the cinematography drops and Jiro chats with a few childhood acquaintances. If Jiro had been interesting enough, we might have wanted to know more about him; but the only thing we might really be curious to know is why sushi captured his life this way, and not airplanes or yoga or construction; and that question is never really answered, or even addressed. 

What saves the film is the minor characters–the restaurant critic Masuhiro Yamamoto, the apprentice Nakazawa, and Jiro's sons Takashi and Yoshikazu. 

Takashi, the younger son, has been allowed to open his own satellite restaurant. An American might conclude that this means his father believes in him, because he has allowed him to spread his wings. But instead, there is a sense that as the younger son, Takashi is not worthy of inheriting the main restaurant, and so he has actually been given the booby prize. Or maybe it's not his birth order but his culinary skills: his customers seem to regard him as a second-class sushi chef by comparison with his father, but despite this Takashi seems happy with his lot. 

In contrast, his elder brother Yoshikazu is well into middle age and still working for his father. Yoshikazu moves through life with an air of resigned sadness. Jiro takes up all the air in the room. It's as if every laugh of the father squeezes his son's heart. 

The question hanging over the movie is this: what will happen when Jiro, now 85, retires or dies? Yoshikazu is the heir apparent, and he clearly has all of his father's talent, but will that be enough? 

And so at the very last minute, the movie dares to question the subject of its own meditation. Is Jiro is really the world's greatest sushi chef, or has he just managed to create a sort of cult around this bizarre, tiny restaurant tucked into a corner of a subway station?