Word Salads

CITY OF GOLD (B) - Food critic Jonathan Gold is driving around his hometown when, unprompted, he tells the camera, "I can't tell you how much I love Los Angeles."

Gold is a thoughtful writer who a decade ago won the Pulitzer for his food writing for L.A. Weekly in the improbable way that Roger Ebert won the Pulitzer for film criticism in the 1970s. And, like Ebert, Gold is passionate about his subject and blessed with the ability to take a niche subject and connect it to broader themes about culture and life. He also is a bit of a renaissance man, raised on classical music, conversant on the cello, and an early aficionado of gangsta rap from earlier in his journalism career.

This documentary is a little too in love with its subject and its seemingly endless opportunities to fetishize L.A. and its neighborhoods. Writer-director Laura Gabbert (2009's "No Impact Man") follows the frumpy -- and, frankly, unhealthy-looking -- Gold to the numerous little restaurants that the writer has discovered over the years, mostly family-run eateries, holes in the wall and strip-mall survivors. Gabbert takes a dreamlike tone and tries a little to hard to find the perfect mix of gritty and gorgeous on the streets of L.A. It is yet another valentine to the City of Angels.

Her final product comes off as too slick. Like Gold, she endeavors to take a deep dive into obscure neighborhood nooks, but comes off as an interloper with her borderline exploitative depictions of minority cultures. Gold has been nurturing his relationships with these people of color for decades; Gabbert's project is by necessity more hit-and-run; at worst you get a whiff of colonialism from the final product. Her lens is impossibly narrow; her color palette a bit too crisp.

For the first hour, "City of Gold" makes you wonder if this wouldn't be better suited to a 20-minute segment on "CBS Sunday Morning" with Charles Osgood or Harry Smith. The aerial shots of L.A. traffic get redundant. You wonder whether it's wise to encourage Gold to stuff himself toward an early grave.

But the final half hour turns pensive and somber, focusing more on his relationship with his wife and children. His teenage kids' affection for Gold as they wander through a museum feels genuine. We learn a little more about his upbringing, as small boy during the upheaval of the 1960s, with its riots and its racial and ethnic tensions.

Gold comes off as an earnest soul, a nimble writer and a true explorer of a hidden, neglected world. When he reads from one of his most memorable essays in the final scene of the film, the depth of emotion is powerful. In the end, this thoughtful man is, himself, an underappreciated treasure worth discovering.

BONUS TRACK
You might want to skip this. It's from the essay he reads at the end of the film. It beautifully captures Gold style and his knack for using his beat to plumb deeper themes:

MAY 7, 1992 -- IT IS 8 O'CLOCK, AND THE light has started to fade as I sit on the floor of my apartment staring at the spot where the rain not so much dripped as oozed from the doorjamb a couple of months ago, swelling the wood and leaving a rust-yellow stain on the wall. Downstairs, a baby cries out in Spanish; in the distance, the Geto Boys boom from a passing truck. For the fifth time in about an hour, I think about the other parts of town, the ones with croissant shops on the street corners and air-conditioned shopping malls and neighbors who look like me. I slap in the new DJ Quik tape and crank up the juice.

For the last 10 years, I have lived in a small apartment building, probably nice in its day, that is located where Koreatown thrusts into the Central American community, and where Salvadoran children startle their grandmothers by leaping out of shadows with toy Uzis and Mac-10s. Nobody has really bothered to give this area a name, though in the news reports that have dominated local television for the last week, the anchors have been calling it "just west of downtown."

Half a mile north, the neighborhood consolidates, takes on weight and a Latin flair, and is clearly part of Hollywood. A couple of blocks south begin the stucco condominium complexes of Wilshire Center -- brand-new but already peeling around the edges -- that provide underground parking and security codes for pink-collar office workers who cannot yet afford Encino or Baldwin Hills. The last time I bothered to count, there were restaurants of 14 ethnicities within a five-minute walk of my front door. The local supermarkets, big as soccer fields, are famous for their selection of multinational goods. Guatemalan women walk home from the Ralphs with bags of groceries balanced expertly on their heads.

My neighborhood has always been transient, a brief stopping place for Thais and Nicaraguans and pale, gaunt poets before they move on to single-family homes in greener parts of town. But to my Korean landlords, this neighborhood is home. When they came into my apartment a couple of years ago to inspect the building they had just bought, they removed their shoes on the landing in the polite Korean manner and promptly drenched their socks on the freshly mopped kitchen floor. I have been awakened before dawn by the rhythmic thud of garlic being pounded into paste on the back porch. I have stumbled out the door with an armful of wet laundry, only to find most of the clothesline taken up by drying fish. I have also come home from work to find the backstairs spread with leaves of cabbage curing in the hot sun. Even when their son was murdered a half-mile south of here, there was no questioning that they belonged. The landlords keep to themselves and so do I, but I sometimes wish that they would invite me over for dinner.