A couple of decades ago, I lived for a year in Singapore. The question I was asked most often was, "Do you know Anthony Bourdain?" He was an idol there. But not only there. Because his TV shows aired in almost every country, people everywhere knew him and saw him as an embodiment of what they liked about America. Bourdain was indisputably Cool, with an aura of disreputable fun, but also generous and open to different cultures. Genuinely worldly, he didn't treat other societies' food as weird, but as delicious, and rooted in things that matter.
We see the blossoming of that openness in Tony, an amusing new movie based on a few pages from his breakthrough book, Kitchen Confidential. Taking a splinter of Bourdain's life — the mid-1970s summer when he was 19 — director Matt Johnson sidesteps the touch-all-the-bases sludge of a biopic. Instead, Tony captures a few telling moments in the life of a wine-dark soul who was, as Homer said of Odysseus, "the man of twists and turns." Bourdain died by suicide in 2018.
When we first meet Bourdain — played by lanky Dominic Sessa — he's an annoyingly brash, deeply insecure Vassar student. A would-be writer, he's trying to B.S. a literary fellowship committee into funding a novel that's a dialogue between Jack Kerouac and George Orwell. He calls the book a bildungsroman, the German term for the literary genre that tracks a person's moral and emotional growth. Naturally, it's Tony's own growth we'll be watching.
When the fellowship doesn't pan out, he heads off to a strangely un-gay Provincetown in hopes of romancing a fellow student, Nancy — that's Emilia Jones from CODA. But he soon finds himself broke and alone. He's rescued by a man known simply as Chef, played by Antonio Banderas, whose sly, sneaky deep performance may well win him an Oscar. Chef lets him sleep on a hammock outside his house, and when Tony lies that he knows about kitchens, hires him to work in the back of his bare-bones seafood restaurant.
Away from work, Tony falls under the sway of his co-worker Sal, played with thuggish panache by rising star Leo Woodall, who's the movie's exemplar of the bad boy chef. Sal steals, beats people up, collects notches from the door frames of women he sleeps with, and gives Tony cocaine in the kitchen. Tony's summer becomes a dialogue between the sociopathic Sal, who pulls him toward the self-destructive darkness that would eventually claim him, and the humane, almost saintly Chef, who helps him tap into the bigheartedness that would make him beloved.
Along the way, Tony finds a calling. He discovers his love of kitchen culture — with its culinary rituals, jocular camaraderie, amphetamine-rush need to get the dishes out, and underlying sense that there's something hallowed in the communal act of eating.
As an origin story, Tony is a tad too neat, yet vastly better than you get in comic book movies whose heroes are transformed by bites from radioactive spiders. From the start, we realize that Tony's surface bravado has no weight. Groping to find his identity, he has the uncoolness of a kid pretending to be cool. This is nicely pulled off by Sessa, a terrific young actor whom you may know as Paul Giamatti's student sidekick in The Holdovers. It's a tricky role because Sessa must give us glimpses of the rock star Bourdain will become while also showing he's not yet there.
Johnson and his co-writers, Todd Bartels, Lou Howe and Matthew Miller, do a nifty job of giving Bourdain's transformation an arresting shape, pulling us into a propulsive rhythm of recurring scenes — Tony working in the kitchen, Chef waking Tony with water in his face, Sal acting psycho, Chef dragging the godless Tony to weekly mass.
Of course, real life lacks the clean arc of a story. Bourdain himself was known for embroidering his tales, and Tony takes similar liberties. In reality, he didn't go to Provincetown to win Nancy. He didn't go there alone. He didn't work at just one restaurant. He didn't have a boss as handsome as Antonio Banderas. There was no Sal, and the actual Tony Bourdain was not the innocent the film makes him seem.
No doubt the filmmakers would reply that, while not literally true, Tony is emotionally true. Maybe so. In any case, the film is emotionally satisfying. Perhaps the highest praise I can offer is that it doesn't depend on Bourdain's fame to keep us interested. I would have enjoyed this movie even if its hero didn't have TV shows that play on every airline in the world.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, call or text 988 to reach the suicide and crisis hotline.
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