Butler's Cinema Scene

Jeremiah Tower

“JEREMIAH TOWER: THE LAST MAGNIFICENT” My rating: B-

120 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Jeremiah Tower isn’t a household name…unless you’re a hard-core foodie.  In which case he is a god walking the earth.

Tower’s career as a chef goes back 40 years to the legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, where with owner Alice Waters he pioneered the notion of local ingredients and a distinctive California cuisine.

Lydia Tenaglia’s documentary “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent,” covers its subject’s triumphs (the San Francisco hot spot Stars) and failures, his long period of exile in Mexico and his recent short-lived resurrection as the head chef at the Tavern on the Green in NYC (the place, apparently, where old chefs go to die).

Tower is an important and controversial figure in the world of American cuisine, at least according to  famous talking heads like Martha Stewart, Anthony Bourdain (a producer of  the film), Wolfgang Puck and Mario Batali.

But Tenaglia’s film is perhaps most powerful in its efforts to understand a man regarded even by close acquaintances as unknowable.

Tower was the son of rich jet-setters who taught him by example how to live well. And that’s about all they taught him. One of the film’s more revealing anecdotes relates his hard-drinking parents’ surprise at learning that young Jeremiah had for months been living undetected in their mansion; each assumed the other had arranged for him to be sent to a boarding school.

He grew up charming, handsome, bisexual — and enigmatic. He had lovers and friends, but he reserved his true passions for food.

We see him wandering around Aztec ruins in Mexico, spouting philosophy. (Tower seems much more comfortable discussing ideas than feelings.)

The film’s final passages describe how Tower came out of retirement to take over Tavern on the Green, and how it all blew up in his face.

There are traces of bitterness in Tower’s comments about the debacle, but ultimately he’s a man who seems absolutely content just to be with himself.

| Robert W. Butler