Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent

Although hardly a household name today, decades ago Jeremiah Tower essentially invented California cuisine in the kitchen at Chez Panisse, becoming a “celebrity chef” years before that was even a thing. So it’s a shame that Lydia Tenaglia’s Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent, rather than displaying that same sort of innovation, commits every cardinal sin of hack documentary filmmaking. Obsequious talking heads dispensing factually dubious generalities, stock footage layered with cheap sound effects, chintzy re-enactments, ruthless credit-hogging and shot after shot of Tower staring blankly out of a car window while interviewees talk about how he’s mysterious and unknowable. Above all, the film perpetuates the Boomer belief that they invented literally everything, even concepts like food and sex that have sustained human life for tens of thousands of years. The Last Magnificent only springs to life in the final third, when it drops the generalities and chronicles Tower’s disastrous comeback at Tavern on the Green. D.B.