When you hear the words ‘food-critic’, Jonathan Gold is probably the kind of person you imagine and City of Gold is a sprawling documentary that explores what life is like for the Pulitzer-winning restaurant critic.
It’s as much a love-letter to Gold and his work as it is the city of LA and Director Laura Gabbert lets City of Gold really lose itself in its subject. It touches on Gold’s impact as a writer and critic, his relationship with the the evolving civic identity of Los Angeles, the disruption and democratization of food criticism over the last twenty years and the philosophical notion that our capacity for cooking is what makes us human. It’s all fascinating stuff – but structurally it doesn’t coalesce into anything more than the sum of its parts.
The documentary follow Gold as he hops from restaurant to restaurant and examines the writer not just through his own words but through the words of his fellow critics and the small business owners whose livelihoods have been transformed by his work. These scenes do a good job of introducing you to Gold’s life today but they don’t go a great job of conveying the context of why his writing matters and how it so aptly reflects the culture of Los Angeles. It isn’t really until the latter half of the film that Gold is properly fleshed out – both as a person and a writer – and the film comes into its own.
The cinematography and scoring in City of Gold is often a mixed-bag. It’s never bad – but it screamed to me of a quantity-over-quality approach. Cinematographer Goro Toshima deploys a staggering amount of footage over the course of the film and while there are some standout shots and locations, there’s also a lot of forgettable filler that could have easily been trimmed out.
The same can be said of Bobby Johnston’s music for the film. Like the metropolis in which it embeds itself, the music in City of Gold has a little bit of everything to offer.
City of Gold is a very well-made film with a lot of interesting things to say about its subject. However, while the film succeeds in saying those things, I never really got the sense that I had sunk my teeth deep enough into any of them to leave satisfied.
Review Score: THREE OUT OF FIVE STARS
City of Gold is screening exclusively at the Golden Age Cinema and Bar in Surry Hills.
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