Four families of diverse ethnicity live, learn, love, and laugh their way through cheaply manufactured Thanksgiving crises in What's Cooking?, a cloying multicultural fantasy set in a middle-class Los Angeles neighborhood. Like a version of Short Cuts based on a week's worth of Lifetime television and a stack of greeting cards, Gurinder Chadha's comedy-drama confuses warmth and generosity of spirit with homey banalities and blatant demographic pandering. As with Jodie Foster's long-forgotten Home For The Holidays, Thanksgiving itself is at least partly to blame for encouraging a formula that's as predictable as turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing, but nowhere near as satisfying. Act one deals with anxieties over impending family conflicts, act two with tense near-misses and food-preparation disasters, and act three with dinner-table blow-ups, conversation stoppers, and resolutions in time for coffee and pumpkin pie. Presumably lured by the craft-services spread, Alfre Woodard, Mercedes Ruehl, Joan Chen, Julianna Margulies, and Kyra Sedgwick lead an impressive ensemble cast through Chadha's schematic paces. With a few intersections, each family divides along ethnic lines: African-American, Mexican, Vietnamese, and Jewish. Respectively, Woodard fends off her overbearing mother-in-law while keeping the peace between her Republican husband (Dennis Haysbert) and their liberal activist son; Ruehl is forced by her extended family to play host to her philandering husband; Chen's concern about her daughter's loose morals keeps her from noticing her youngest son's involvement in a local gang; and newly outed lesbian Sedgwick brings her "roommate" (Margulies) home to her frazzled parents. From the opening credits, which stupidly rework "The Star Spangled Banner" with diverse music cues for each clan, What's Cooking? means to celebrate Thanksgiving as emblematic of the American melting pot. It's an agreeable message, but then, everything about the film is agreeable in the worst sense, because Chadha refuses to take chances or tweak convention. The game cast, including Seinfeld's Estelle Harris in a funny cameo, does what it can to bring dimension to the thinly realized characters. But, like the most generic television, What's Cooking? is made for all audiences but appealing to none.