by Anne Wheeler, 1999.
Starring: Christina Cox, Wendy Crewson, Marya Delver, Karyn Dwyer, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Kevin Mundy, and Peter Outerbridge.
Rating: 8/10, 6/10.
Better Than Chocolate is not a great movie. It’s a wonderful romantic comedy, a feel-good, heartwarming movie about acceptance, love, and sex, and it’s a great big bunch of fun to watch.
Maggie (Dwyer) is a recent college dropout working at Ten Percent Books who hasn’t told her mother, Lila (Crewson), either that she’s no longer at college or that she’s a lesbian. She meets and (almost unsettlingly) quickly falls in love with Kim (Cox), a travelling painter, only to have her mother call and tell her she’s divorced her husband (Maggie’s father) and is coming to stay in Maggie’s apartment (which doesn’t exist) for a while, with her son (Maggie’s brother), Paul (Mundy). Also involved, so we can get names and relationships out of the way, are Carla (Delver), who is interested in sex of any kind, with anyone, and who works at Ten Percent; Frances (MacDonald), the androgynous-looking hardcore lesbian owner of Ten Percent who is becoming increasingly upset over customs’s attempts to block her merchandise at the border; and Judy (Outerbridge), a pre-operation M-to-F transsexual who is in love with Frances. OK. (It’s not overwhelming when you’re watching it; in fact, it’s all very easy to follow.) So Lila and Paul arrive at the apartment Maggie has arranged to borrow for a bit, and she (Maggie) manages to pass Kim off as merely a friend (except for when Paul catches them in flagrante delicto, which surprises and amuses him rather than shocking and disgusting him). Lila becomes good friends with Judy, who easily passes herself off as a "normal", biological woman. Paul and Carla get their thang on. Judy obsesses over Frances. Frances uncomfortably obsesses back, and takes it all out on the customs guy. There’s trouble in Maggie-and-Kim-land, Lila slowly figures everything out, Judy sings a deliriously wonderful song, and firebombing is involved. And of course, everything turns out OK (sorry, I just couldn’t mention the firebombing without saying that).
Through it all, we fall absolutely in love with all the characters. Dwyer, whom I’ve seen described as too happy in this film, is just happy enough, and just exasperated enough at the difficulties thrown in her way, and she pulls it all off more than charmingly. Cox has the butch-but-not-too-butch thing down, and the scenes between her and Dwyer seem totally unforced and natural. Crewson is loveably clueless as the sexually frustrated, trying to be conservative but failing mother. Mundy and Delver don’t feature too greatly in the film, but they serve very well, and we care about them even though their roles are relatively minor. MacDonald is plain old adorable as lonely-but-hiding-it, work-obsessed Frances, who slowly begins to see that love can cross boundaries she didn’t think it ever could. But the most amazing of all is Outerbridge. His portrayal of Judy is so real, so wonderful, so intense (at times), that I wish I could give him a big hug and tell him how happy I am he got into acting.
To be honest, one of the things about this movie that I'm most impressed with is the sex, whether between Kim and Maggie, Carla and Paul, Judy and Frances (ok, so it's not sex, but it wants to be), or Lila and the vibrators. This movie really has the best sex scenes I have EVER seen.
So anyway, don’t go into Better Than Chocolate expecting the next Casablanca or something. It’s a romantic comedy, plain and simple, and possibly the best of the genre that I’ve ever seen. I think the fact that the characters are gay sort of raised the expectations of reviewers, making them unfairly judge the film by standards it shouldn’t have been judged by, which is why I believe it got so many bad reviews. If the reviewers had realized that gay people can have romantic comedies, too, then I think they would have appreciated it more.