By Mark Fields
Biopic Explores One Summer in Life of Young Anthony Bourdain
Acclaimed chef, author, and reality TV star Anthony Bourdain was known for his prickly arrogance almost as much as for his culinary skill and erudition. This is so true that the new biopic Tony, focused on one formative summer in his youth, opens with this quote from Bourdain himself: “I was – to be frank – a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
The unfortunate fact about this film from director Matt Johnson is that the Bourdain character never transcends his spot-on description. The titular Tony, as portrayed by Dominic Sessa, ends the film story as dislikable and oblivious as he begins it. In fact, the biggest unanswered question is why anyone in his life – friends, girlfriends, mentors – saw anything in his personality worth admiring or investing in. The second question is why Tony, sadly, never gets the good ass-kicking that he (and we) think he deserves.
Tony opens with him pitching a ludicrous and egotistical proposal for a summer fellowship to his Vassar professors, and then him bragging to friends and a potential romantic conquest that he already had the prize in his pocket. When that unsurprisingly does not occur, a humiliated Tony flees to Provincetown on Cape Cod in ill-considered pursuit of that young lady. Without money or housing, he gets a temporary job in the kitchen of a seafood restaurant owned and run by an enigmatic chef (Antonio Banderas).
The rest of the film follows Tony throughout that summer, goofing off, getting drunk, and generally wasting his time. Eventually, he inexplicably earns the trust of his chef mentor and the girl (played by Emilia Jones), despite the many lies he’s told to both of them. But, he quickly demonstrates to each that he doesn’t deserve that trust.
Tony does a fairly good job of capturing the zeitgeist of 1970s vacation resort Provincetown, and it also shows the less glamorous, even vaguely stomach-turning, workings of a downscale restaurant kitchen. The whole film has a rather worn, grimy quality to it that is fitting of the setting, but also tedious for the viewer.
Within the limited confines of this story, the audience never sees any growing self-awareness of Tony’s copious character flaws, any genuine reckoning for his deceptions and bad behavior, or any spark of true talent to offset the downsides. That a cocky young Tony could evolve into an arrogant adult Anthony Bourdain is never in doubt, but where are the glimmer of the mastery he displayed later in life? At the end of the movie, our summer spent with the young Tony has felt pretty endless…and unappetizing.
Official Trailer
