City of Gold

There’s not a whole lot to be said about Laura Gabbert’s City of Gold. It won’t change your life, and it won’t make you rethink the documentary format. It’s a genial look at Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles food critic Jonathan Gold, with the fairly rumpled Mr. Gold front and center for its entire length. But it’s a good bit more than just a portrait of Gold and can be looked at from a number of different angles — including from my perspective, seeing just how much being a food critic and a movie critic have in common. For instance, I greatly admire his stance on not taking notes while eating. (“You could take notes when you’re having sex, too, but you’d sort of be missing out on something.”) I know where Gold is coming from, in that I’d say exactly the same thing about reviewing a movie. I also know where he’s coming from about looming deadlines and about getting a sense of suffering from writer’s block despite churning out 150,000 words a year. And I certainly understand the lingering feeling that getting paid for doing what I do is “getting away with something.” (Undoubtedly, there are those who would agree with that last.)

Of course, I realize that’s a rather specialized view of the movie, even if it did make me warm to Gold more than I already had — and, believe me, it’s hard to not to warm to this man. Words like genial and affectionate come readily to mind in connection with both Gold and this unassuming portrait of him. I’m not altogether sure any film about Gold could be other than unassuming. You see, while I’m sure the man must weigh in on the more elite eateries in Los Angeles, his special passion — at least as presented here — appears to be smaller, specialized, decidedly offbeat venues. His preferred stomping grounds are mom and pop restaurants, various ethnic food joints (often in that most derided American institution, the strip mall) food trucks, hot dog stands and food courts. He’s like an explorer charting unknown regions, but regions of food.

It all seems to have started when Gold decided to “eat his way through” Pico Boulevard, a 15-mile stretch that extends from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica. This cemented his belief the city was the opposite of the American melting pot concept and was, instead, a place brimming with neighborhoods that represented the individual qualities — and cuisines — of their various populations. It’s the sort of diversity that only a city as sprawled out as Los Angeles could encompass. In this respect, City of Gold is as much about the city as it is about Gold. (After all, the title suggests as much.)

But, then, Gold himself is nothing if not diverse. This is a man who started out studying classic cello, then became a huge fan of punk rock (it seems earlier pop-rock just wasn’t something he encountered). It was fairly late in the day that he ended up with the food critic gig, and it was clearly something he made his own. Looking at the interior of his home — with books stacked everywhere, even on the stairs — it’s clear that this is a man of many interests. After all, we are talking about a man who will try something called hagfish, a Korean food described as being “like eel, only a lot worse.” For that matter, the sojourn into the realm of fried grasshoppers did not encourage me to seek them out. On the other hand, so much of the food and its unassuming nature — and especially Gold’s enthusiasm for it — is, like the film itself, very appealing indeed. Rated R for some language.