Movie Reviews : ‘Consuming Passions’ Embodies the Economic Ethic

In the erratic but sometimes hilarious “Consuming Passions” (Westside Pavilion), the film makers take a dark premise--cannibalism in consumer culture--as part of a “viable marketing strategy.”

The script, based on a play by Michael Palin and Terry Jones, shows a bumbling, Candide-esque hero, Ian (Tyler Butterworth), who on his first anxious day at the Chumley Candy factory accidentally drowns three workers in one of the chocolate vats.

So heavily automated is Chumley’s, that, within minutes, the hapless employees--chopped up into raspberry creams and packaged as “Passionelles”--are being trucked off to Pottersea. There, to the bewilderment of the factory’s old owner (Freddie Jones) and new conglomerate tyrant (Jonathan Pryce), the candy becomes a hit, while elsewhere, despite lavish ads, it’s a failure--perhaps due to the new cost-cutting strategy: eliminating chocolate and replacing it with colored vegetable protein.

There are three consuming passions operating here: greed, gluttony and sexual desire. And of all of them, greed is the predominant motive. Tactician Pryce rejects the idea of putting chocolate back in the candy as economically unsound, but he’s intrigued with the potential of human meat. (Obviously Palin, Jones--and screenwriters Paul D. Zimmerman and Andrew Davies--are drawing parallels with the modern movie industry here.)

Pulled into Pryce’s bloody Burke-and-Hare strategy is the horrified Ian, who, after his disgrace, is hired back and promoted repeatedly to keep him quiet. His major job becomes the servicing of Mrs. Ganza (Vanessa Redgrave), the voracious widow of one of the three deceased secret ingredients.

To make a story like this work, you need to play it unafraid and full throttle, and “Consuming Passions,” unfortunately, has been pushed only to half. Three of the actors play it exactly right, as unabashed comic grotesques: Redgrave, full-blown and passionately absurd with a deliciously depraved Eastern European accent; Sammi Davis (“Hope and Glory”), as Ian’s girlfriend, the inept head of Quality Control; and Jones, who hits heights of apoplectic frenzy as Chumley.

But Butterworth and Pryce often seem to be backing away slightly. It may be a pity that Jones and Palin didn’t adapt themselves, that Jones didn’t direct and Palin didn’t play Pryce’s part. Director Giles Foster gets some fine scenes--Butterworth and Jones by the seaside, Redgrave’s spiderish tangos--and he works well in the whole mixed Ealing Studio-Boulting Brothers-Monty Python tradition that the story draws on. But he doesn’t get the baroque, fear-drenched visuals that this movie probably needs, the style of “Dr. Strangelove” or “Brazil.”

Flaws aside, there’s a refreshingly moral notion behind “Consuming Passions” (MPAA-rated R, for sex and language): an attack on the inhumanity of some modern corporate decisions. Which is worse: a candy manufacturer who adds bodies to his bonbons, or a lawyer who advises his industrial clients to ignore and conceal a deadly manufacturing defect? It’s that consuming passion--for the bottom line of economics and the bottom level of morality--that the movie attacks most scathingly.