Figureheads who are mean are all the rage with reality programming and, by extension, documentaries. There are few easier ways to make a doc than to glom onto some loudmouth firecracker, burning film as he launches into unsightly, borderline sociopathic jags. Pressure Cooker, concerning the culinary program at Northeast Philly’s Frankford High School, appears to have found its very own assholish doc star in Wilma Stephenson, the program’s stern and ill-tempered instructor. Not only will she stop class to loudly berate a student for accidentally slamming a door, she also claims if one can pass her class, one can pass life. Yikes!
But not so fast. Stephenson may initially send chills down the spine and shatter eardrums, but it only takes about a reel to realize she’s not remotely an Anna Wintour devil. Indeed, spend more than a smidgen of time with her and you notice she’s in fact a good and decent and deeply caring person, one who genuinely engages with her pupils—be it on the finer points of cooking or the finer points of their love lives. She may boast a short fuse, but she pushes her students in the most constructive way possible, teaching them the values of dedication, responsibility and hard work. And the class we see takes her volatile teaching method in the right way, cueing one happy ending after another. Hooray!
Except that there’s that pesky thing called drama. Pressure Cooker is too heartwarming. Yes, documentarians Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker show the classmates—or the small group on whom it focuses—overcoming one obstacle or another, like getting the hell out of North Philadelphia. But watching good people trying hard and succeeding, while inspiring, isn’t very exciting. Pressure Cooker barely holds the interest and entertains; it could use more darkness. (Of course, it isn’t the directors’ fault if there wasn’t any to film.) Here’s the one verité-style doc that wouldn’t be superior if turned into a TLC show. It can barely fill the 99 minutes it has. B-
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