MARCELLA - Mark Reviews Movies

Marcella, Greenwich Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 8, 2025

Marcella Hazan did for Italian cuisine in the United States what Julia Child did for the French variety, basically. The writer of several cookbooks, who never reached the level of TV fame as some of her contemporaries, is the subject of director Peter Miller's Marcella. It's a by-the-numbers sort of biography.

Such documentaries fit into fairly a standard formula at this point, and Miller includes, maybe, one slightly interesting idea in it. That's certainly not the movie's introduction, which is a montage of Hazan on television, archival footage of famous broadcasters introducing her (If documentary filmmakers were barred from ever again editing together news anchors saying the subject's name in rapid succession, it would go a long way toward stopping this kind of simplistic approach), and modern-day talking heads explaining why she's so important in about a sentence.

It's easy to understand the appeal of this brand of hook for a documentary, especially one that's about a person or event that's not as well-known as others. Right away, the audience knows those journalistic basics of who, what, when, where, and why, but ideally, that should be just the start of a deeper dive into the topic at hand. The most frustrating examples of these documentaries, which follow a cookie-cutter pattern, are the ones in which the introduction could have served as the entire movie. This one comes pretty close to that.

Sure, we learn some specifics about Hazan's biography, such as the fact that she grew up in Italy (including teenage years during World War II), moved to the United States with her working husband, and developed a skill for cooking while preparing daily lunches and dinners for him. What's most fascinating about Hazan's technique is how seemingly haphazard it was. That's not to criticize the approach or the results, which look delectable whenever we see her or one of her fans and proteges preparing a dish, but it is intriguing that someone who became famous for writing recipe books worked without measuring, keeping track of time for, or even tasting her own work.

Measuring didn't matter, because Hazan figured out these meals on her own and knew exactly how much of each ingredient to include by way of a kind of sense memory. Cooking time amounted to her knowing "when it's done," which is one of lessons repeated by her and others throughout the movie. As for taste, she trusted smell more, and while watching some of these dishes be made for the camera, that approach seems to make more sense.

Hazan prepared dishes ingredient by ingredient, essentially, so when diced onions were finished browning, the odor would be unmistakable. When the tomatoes for a simple sauce were ready, it's as if Hazan could smell that something was missing, which was when it was time to add any seasoning for said sauce.

One of the amusing details is that this made the actual writing of her cookbooks a bit of a challenge. For one thing, Hazan couldn't write in English, but her husband Victor could. Because recipes require actual measurements, by the way, he would also catch his wife's ingredients before she added them for cooking, measured them properly, and kept notes for book itself.

The one genuinely appreciated touch of Miller's narrative here is the inclusion of people cooking Hazan's way. They include other chefs, who swear by Hazan's method as one that pretty much anyone with the right—and, usually, easy-to-obtain—ingredients and even a little time could prepare, and Hazan's son Giuliano, who says he can still hear his mother, who died in 2013, instructing him in his head whenever he cooks. It's one thing to be told that Hazan's cookbooks sold as well as they did because she made instructions simple, plain, and pretty much fool-proof. It's another entirely to actually see people prepare full meals with only four ingredients and very little effort.

Otherwise, the movie is exactly what one would expect of this kind of straightforward and to-the-point biography. We learn about where Hazan lived and when, who helped her career as author and who has benefitted from those books, and what made her well-known and why she wasn't as famous as some others doing the same work (According to some of the experts on hand, it was her accent, her trouble with speaking English, and her blunt attitude, although other chefs have become celebrities with exactly those characteristics). It's strange how little there is by way of personal anecdotes here, as well as how many times the movie presents an event in Hazan's life, only for us to realize that the event itself has no significance beyond following a chronological account of where she is at a given moment.

Marcella doesn't offer much in the way of insight into its subject or her influence beyond the basics. Well, it does when we witness those dishes being made, because there's no denying those results.

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