K-SCORE: 87
Director: David Gleb
Subject: Jiro Yoshino
Spoiler Level: Unspoilable
“Jiro strives for perfection when perfection just doesn’t exist.”
After most people in my life recommended that I watch this documentary, I guess because I like films and sushi, I finally watched the life story of Jiro Yoshino and his delusional quest to perfect his craft. I can’t find much fault with the presentation of the subject matter by director David Gleb. Perhaps the music is heavy-handed at times, but that’s nitpicky. And sushi genius Jiro makes for an interesting character, as do his sons. The most important thing a documentary can do is step back and let the material speak for itself, let any creativity be completed in the editing room, picking and choosing when and how to display the actual people, clips, and quotes. Gleb knew this, and so Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a success.
“Jiro and his sushi are oddly dazzling”
Jiro is definitely an interesting man, an 85-year-old chef who’s been making sushi for three-quarters of a century. Every detail regarding his craft is fascinating, how the seemingly simple rice beneath fresh fish can have so many areas in need of improvement. Without realizing it, the film poses important questions about personal taste. How many people are actually capable of tasting the difference between Jiro’s sushi and someone who spends half that time making sushi? Is it really worth 1500 yen per bite? At no point was the Japanese word for ‘subjective’ uttered, which to me, indicates a degree of delusion. Jiro strives for perfection when perfection just doesn’t exist. I’ve seen this elsewhere. (Sometimes I think my father works as a radiologist under the false belief that one day he’ll have diagnosed every ailment of every unhealthy person in Northeast Ohio.) The delusion is what drives them, keeps them working. There’s something beautiful about how much this old man loves his work, and I think it’s great that he’s long established the policy that he’ll only retire when he physically can’t work anymore. Or he’ll just work until he dies. I take no issue with that philosophy if making sushi is his passion.
What I hadn’t heard others discuss and what I find disturbing about Jiro Dreams of Sushi is how Jiro’s obsession with sushi has consumed the lives of his sons. They too are unequivocal experts in the field, yet they work under Jiro, in his shadow, and he has set up that system and keeps them beneath him. A 60-year-old man is too old to be an apprentice. I hope they love the craft too, but I wasn’t convinced they did by the film, and I’m positive that those two men don’t fully understand the possibilities life could have offered them had their father given them more freedom to control their own destinies. Jiro partially made up for it towards the end of the film by expressing his appreciation for his apprentices that train for years on how to cook rice or how to tenderize octopus, but not enough. Jiro has serious faults as a father and the film doesn’t know how to strike the right tone to acknowledge that - Jiro Dreams of Sushi, yes, but at a rather serious cost.
It’s a thought-provoking film, and Jiro and his sushi are oddly dazzling. Somehow though, I wouldn’t want to eat at his restaurant. I love sushi, yet I don’t think I’ve eaten enough of it to feel like I would understand what I was spending my money on, even if I had the money to spare. It’s like drinking $3500 brandy at some point. Many let the price point mark this as “the best” in what has to be an at least partially subjective world. Now if I could stand in the back eating sushi in batches as the apprentices were “practicing” and not quite getting it right, I’d be there in a heartbeat. Or however many heartbeats it takes to get to Tokyo.