Toast

Director: S.J. Clarkson
Cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Ken Scott, Victoria Hamilton, Freddie Highmore
Genre: Biography/Comedy/Drama 2010
Running time: 96 mins.
Rating:★★★

A look on the childhood, during 1960's Britain, of food writer Nigel Slater. Through tragedy and hardship, this journey into adulthood is whisked into culinary heaven from the tastes and smells that a young boy associates with along the way. Based on the award-winning memoir by Nigel Slater. Created and produced for television.

Though usually relating a movie as a TV movie is one of my favorite insults to use, the magic of this boy's desire to know how to cook transcends the insult into a fairy tale. Despite the lack of support from his parents, a mother whose specialty is toast and a father who is an arrogant ass, the small guidance of his gardener, Josh and his father's lover (pettily, I might add), his education and passion take off into a wonderful journey that you, the audience, can't wait to follow. It is comedic and endearing that his culinary experimentation really began as an attempt to make his father love him, which turns into away to escape from the people he doesn't want to be around at all, his father and Mrs. Potter (Helena Bonham Carter), and to keep the memory of his mother alive. Mrs. Potter is brass, comedic, and sadistically fantastic in her role in Nigel's life.

Love the use of washed out-muted yellows in the cinematography and costume design, allow you to feel like you're going back in time and understand what life must have been like for Nigel Slater as a child. But with the saying that "things have a funny way of working out," the fairy tale that is Slater's story and life coincidentally.....did!