The Perfect Cappuccino

The first review I wrote is about a terrific documentary which I saw at the Hardacre Film Festival in Tipton, Iowa. This festival is held every year, at the beginning of August, in Tipton's beautifully preserved downtown theater, the Hardacre. It's a real pleasure to watch movies in old stand-alone theaters like this one. The festival features many different types of film--features, documentaries, short narrative, experimental, etc. It's a great event. Check it out at www.tiptoniowa.us/hardacre/. The Perfect Cappuccino is not in distribution, but it is being shown around the country at various festivals and single screenings. Information on it can be found at www.cappuccinomovie.com/index.php. It is due to be released on dvd sometime in Feburary of 2009, I believe. I loved this film, and I have never even tasted cappuccino! I drink coffee, but not the good kind. Here is my review of this very fine film:


THE PERFECT CAPPUCCINO

Of all the films I saw at the 2008 Hardacre Film Festival in Tipton, Iowa, the most delightful surprise was a documentary called The Perfect Cappuccino. The film has what I considered at first an unpromising premise: a woman, filmmaker Amy Ferraris, searches through the coffee shops of America for a cup of cappuccino the equal of those she’s tasted in Italy. But it’s not long before the film reveals that this simple idea is merely the pretext for a highly entertaining and surprisingly complex exploration of weightier themes. Narrated by Ferraris herself, her warm, friendly voice lends a distinctive charm to the film, especially the beginning, which recounts her fateful trip to Italy as a 16-year-old with her high school class, where she discovers cappuccino in the coffee shops that dot the streets of every Italian town and begins her lifelong love affair with the drink.
This is a documentary of the personal essay variety, and Ferraris quickly proves herself someone worth listening to, even on this seemingly most idiosyncratic of subjects. But the film is filled with surprises, and the first is the melancholy turn it takes as she bemoans the impossibility of finding anything close to the experience of drinking well-prepared cappuccino at home in the U.S. Her complaint isn’t because she’s overcritical or a snob, but because she runs headlong into the fact that despite a growing culture of coffee consumption in sidewalk shops and coffee bars over the past two decades, America’s coffee habit has been dominated by a single company, whose mass-produced cappuccino and other espresso-based drinks are a far cry from the personal artistry of the Italian baristas whose creations so captivated Ferraris’s taste buds as a teenager.
This company is, of course, Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffee giant that seemingly has a store on every corner in every American city and at least two in every mall. Much of the film’s second act details Ferraris’s attempts to figure out why Starbucks has become so successful and why the American public is so taken with its bewildering variety of coffee-laced drinks, drinks that she feels have more to do with clever marketing than with any true appreciation of coffee as a beverage with a unique character and a rich and fascinating history.
This is Michael Moore territory, of course, the lone figure taking a stand against the big corporation, a formula Moore introduced brilliantly in his first film, Roger and Me, and has duplicated and refined in many subsequent TV shows and films. But despite her real issues with Starbucks (including a Moore-like inability to interview company representatives, despite her numerous appeals and their repeated promises to talk), Ferraris wisely avoids the confrontational style and absurdist grandstanding that have become Moore’s signature, and which have made his films so polarizing. Instead, she takes a gentler approach, weaving her film subtly back and forth between the attempts to satisfy her personal need for genuine cappuccino and the deeper concerns about corporate America that Starbucks’s rapid growth and near-monopolistic market domination force into the movie’s foreground. The tone of the film grows more troubled as a sadder Ferraris asks questions about the way business is done in America--questions that have been asked often before but never answered--and wearily interviews bemused Starbucks patrons about why they keep going back and what they like about the drinks they consume.
The interviews provide some of the film’s best moments. Clueless Starbucks patrons offer some humorous asides, but the real power of other voices in the film come from the Italian experts--baristas and businessmen both--who have devoted their lives to espresso culture and provide insight, and an objective basis, to Ferraris’s passion. Listening to them talk, one begins to truly sense why the right approach to preparing and drinking coffee is important, and why America’s casual and uninformed acceptance of an inferior version of the experience is yet another example of our arrogant disregard for western cultural tradition.
Not that the U.S. is a complete coffee wasteland. Ferraris covers the recent movement of independent coffee brewers and shop owners that are springing up throughout the country--referred to here as the “Third Wave”--and spends a great deal of time with the owner of DoubleShot Coffee, a small espresso shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Brian, the owner, obsesses over the roasting of his own coffee beans not just out of perfectionism but as a way to establish his independence from the onslaught of chain store coffee shops. And in his case the onslaught is real. He becomes the target of a lawsuit by Starbucks, which believes it owns the copyright to the term “doubleshot” as used in its canned Starbucks Doubleshot drinks. This lawsuit, and its impact on Brian and his regular customers--a Cheers-like cast of characters--provides the film with its most potent drama, and Brian emerges late in the film as its de facto hero for his refusal to submit to the considerable pressure Starbucks brings on him to change the name of his business.
Although Ferraris points out that the lawsuit is just one of hundreds Starbucks files each year as a way to keep its competition at bay, it resonates with the audience because of Brian’s quiet resolve and commitment to principle. His calm demeanor and appealing, low-key personality belie the anger he admits to feeling, and tempers--if only slightly--the almost unnerving stubbornness with which he refuses to bend. He’s a quintessential American Type from fiction and movies: a man of few words but strong convictions and an independent streak who faces down seemingly impossible odds with an almost reluctant dignity, the hero of a thousand westerns. The viewer is forced to watch this part of the film unfold slowly over the course of its last half, and Ferraris, a professional film editor by day, skillfully leads the story of Brian and DoubleShot to a surprising and satisfying conclusion, creating the kind of suspense one rarely finds in fiction films today, but which film buffs will recall fondly from those of years past.
Whether this movie will persuade devotees of Starbucks or other coffee chains that what they’re drinking is unworthy stuff, a debasement of Old World culture and charm, is anyone’s guess, of course. The perfect coffee, or espresso, or cappuccino ultimately--like beauty--is in the eye, or in this case the mouth, of the beholder, because it is a wholly personal aesthetic choice. But Ferraris’s film is so engaging, it should make even the most hardened philistine of coffee slurpers want to explore the world she portrays, a testament not only to her movie’s technical sophistication but to the persuasiveness of her voice. It is a remarkably fresh and appealing voice, self-effacing and funny, but deadly serious in its conviction that big business is committed to stifling the emergence of a genuine coffee culture in America. In the film’s one true Michael Moore moment, she is filming the outside of a Starbucks store when the manager opens the door and yells at her to stop. She replies that she has the right to film anything she wants from a public sidewalk, and he quickly retreats. She says it quietly, however, without anger, stating her rights as matter-of-factly as if she were telling someone the time of day. The moment typifies the ease with which this film is able to move beyond its highly personal subject to the level of universal appeal and import, in addition to capturing its surprising power.
In case you’re wondering, Ferraris’s search for the perfect cappuccino does not end in vain. She finds it in the end, but revealing this will not spoil the film’s conclusion for you because even the way her search is rewarded has its own unexpected twist, one with a particular poignancy to it. Just one more surprise from this utterly charming, unique, and extremely thoughtful film.