Director: Matt Johnson
Writers: Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, Matt Johnson, Matthew Miller
Cast: Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, Stavros Halkias
Rating: 3/5
It’s very funny how Matt Johnson’s Tony is so coy about the fact that it’s a film about Anthony Bourdain, but it starts precisely with one of his most famous quotes. “I was a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
It’s a perfect way to encapsulate Bourdain’s restless and self-hating spirit like a punk rocker who deems his coolness to be both a blessing and a curse. But miss the first thirty seconds of the film, and it’s like the film goes out of its way to address what every single piece of marketing says.
Tony is the story of Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) before he went by his full name. “Only my mother calls me Anthony,” he tells the board of a writing fellowship he’s applying for. He tells everyone he won the fellowship to write a novel over the summer, so when he receives a call telling him his application was rejected, Tony leaves his home in New Jersey towards Cape Town, because there’s a girl, Nancy (Emilia Jones), from college spending the summer there, and it always starts with the girl.
On the first day in Cape Cod, Tony lives a whole life. Nancy has a boyfriend, Tony drinks his woes in a local restaurant, and his rough approach towards the waitress warrants him a “good ass-kicking, which, as we established, is exactly what he needed. Penniless and with a fashionable black eye, Tony is helped by the benevolent Chef (Antonio Banderas), an ambiguously Iberian chef of a local seafood restaurant. Chef (we never know his name) lets Tony sleep in his hammock, and for payment, he washes dishes at his restaurant.
Johnson glamorises the life in the kitchen as an incubator for rebels and dissidents. Number one of these is Sal (Leo Woodall), a dedicated oyster shucker during working hours, but a dilettante bad boy outside. Sal takes Tony around Cape Cod for parties, alcohol and drugs, but every day Chef dumps a bucket of seawater on Tony to make sure he goes back to work.
Most of this didn’t happen this way. Matt Johnson and his writers took elements from Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential and reimagined it as coming of age story. It’s a recognisable narrative frame to easily dramatise the transformation of Tony into Anthony. The approach allows Johnson to avoid the easy trap of biopics, where the structure gets muddled by inconveniences like the passage of time. It lets him focus on Tony’s journey to condense what was probably half a decade of events into one simple summer.
But on the other hand, it’s an easy cop-out that maybe trivialises a complex man. We know little about Anthony Bourdain. We think we know a lot because he poured his heart and soul into his TV shows, but you can never really understand what happens in the head of a person who commits suicide. What we know is that Anthony Bourdain loved music, especially old proto-punk and 80s underground. We know he liked Sonic Youth and Iggy Pop. We know he loved the work of Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai and Jim Jarmusch. We know he hated Henry Kissinger so much that he wanted to beat him to death with his own bare hands. I’ve seen the clip of his episode in Singapore where he shames a group of young, rich locals for their lack of class conscience; we know that in him.
Unfortunately, that side doesn’t shine through in Tony. It’s a safe film about a man who never played it safe. Johnson’s intentions are in the right place, but I doubt that what made Bourdain so cool in my eyes was there when he was a good-for-nothing troublemaker.
I do like how Sessa plays Tony his own way. No one is trying to mimic anyone here. Sessa is an idealised, almost too comfortable version of the man. That version of him that settles in the charming chaos of food. Banderas and Woodall represent his control and recklessness, respectively, and twice Johnson points out at the crossroads of either following the master who will develop you as a human being, or the immature, drug addict who lives a little too fast.
Anthony Bourdain was, at the end of the day, a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. But the question in everyone’s minds is: Would he like Tony? And I think he would. But only if he knew it wasn’t about him.
