Matt Johnson’s “Tony” is a pleasant, earnest, and warm biopic, which is a shame because Anthony Bourdain was, seemingly, anything but and so much more. A fictionalized retelling of Bourdain’s time spent cutting his teeth at a restaurant on Cape Cod, as regaled in his bestselling memoir “Kitchen Confidential”, “Tony” is desperate for austerity; bathing 1970’s Provincetown, Massachusettes in the amber glow of memory, of sun drenched beaches, the quiet chaos of a neighborhood restaurant kitchen, and the petty mistruths of a young man who would come to be prolific. It’s boilerplate in the most inane way, treacly without committing to its own sugar rush while attempting to skirt the line between hero worship and expose, which isn’t to say that the performers and the directorial work are not top-notch because they are. “Tony” is a well-done steak from a well-established restaurant, a perfectly bland, if forgettable, meal that tastes fine going down and leaves no impression once the waiter has taken the check. Rare is it that a filmmaker and subject are so obviously paired only for that same pairing to yield such tepid results; an overcooked sludge that could have been something worthy of a Michelin star.
“Tony” follows a young Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa), although he prefers to be called Tony because only his mother refers to him as Anthony. He is an overly pretentious would-be writer trying to skeeze his way through a Vassar education while aspiring to be the next great American author. He’s applied for a writing fellowship, half-assing his interview with the stuffed shirts on the committee by espousing the virtues of Hemingway and Salinger and betting that moxie alone, if certainly not a cohesive vision or idea, will woo them into giving him the cash he needs to make it to New York City. While celebrating his presumed success with a buddy at a local bar, Tony runs into a young woman he had a crush on in high school and attempts to woo her with a combination of smooth talk, pretentious vocabulary, and a pair of nun chucks suggestively wedged into his belt. The woman, Nancy (Emilia Jones), is somewhat charmed by his bravado and says that he should find her after she spends a Summer slinging pizzas in Provincetown. But, returning home, Tony learns that he in fact did not earn the fellowship and so, instead of owning up to his presumptive lies to both friends and family, decides to steal cash from his father’s wallet and skip town for the Cape; hoping to find the woman who could give his intellectual vagrancy some meaning, and perhaps get laid in the process. Arriving at Provincetown, he finds his efforts are fruitless; Nancy is dating someone. After a drunken night at a local pub, where he ends up beaten and robbed in a gutter after grabbing the hand of a kindly bartender, Tony wakes up on the back porch hammock of a chef who took pity on him (Antonio Banderas). While attempting to return home, Tony finds Nancy and continues the lie about the fellowship, saying that he was sent here instead of New York. Armed with a renewed faith that his mistruths might get him the girl of his dreams, along with a life worthy of a novel he believes he is capable of writing, Tony begs a job from the kindly Chef, setting him on a path of kitchen misadventures that will secure a future he has no idea is coming for him.
Matt Johnson is a filmmaker who has been putting out exciting, dangerous movies since 2013, when he released the micro-budget, found footage gem that is “The Dirties”, a loose reimagining of the Columbine massacre from the perspective of the killers. “The Dirties” is bold, cheeky, uncomfortable in the absolute best way; a staple of Johnson’s borderline gonzo style of creation, a maximalist reevaluation of media that twists conventions and reforms them into something as novel as it is hilarious. His other directorial work, “Operation Avalanche”, “Blackberry”, and “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” all rise boldly beside the languidity of his peers; standing above the fray and screaming whilst thumbing a middle finger at establishment norms. This is the man who revolutionized the utilization of “Fair Use” media in independent films; a punk rock side-stepping of norms in favor of using established art as fodder for cinematic collage, reforming it into something new and extraordinary. That same anti-establishment perspective is textual to Anthony Bourdain; his willingness to spit in the eye of gatekeepers, wrench open access to unseen degradation hiding behind the velvet shrouds of opulence, a wry and winking love for all things honest and different. Starting with “Kitchen Confidential”, but becoming even more prolific with his shows “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown”, Bourdain was an artist, a documentarian who used his own perspective as a canvas upon which to project the idiosyncrasies of the world to a hungry audience for whom he was our avatar. His influences were myriad, from Kurosawa films to the underground music flooding the streets of New York City and the writings of Hunter S. Thompson, and unashamed of his past as an addict and profound layabout. He spoke of food with the same poetry he described the rampant thievery and drug use of kitchen workers and saw beauty in the feeding of people from all walks of life. His legacy, which has only grown in estimation since his death in 2018, feels to be ample ground for dramatic reinterpretation; certainly not a direct adaptation but a spiritual one, a slapdash psycho-cinematic experience that speaks to the hyper-contradictions of his work and life. The melding of Bourdain and Johnson feels like a no-brainer and ideally would have wrought a film that approximated the feeling of reading Tony’s writing, brash and intellectual, humanitarian and borderline socialist; a man of the people who sadly burned out before the world was done with him. But what “Tony” creates for us instead is not a reflection of the man so much as a monument to the “importance” of the man; a slow, somber, soft-hearted coming-of-age film that could have been made about anybody and, frankly, by anybody. If you take the credits off this film, you’d never know this is a Matt Johnson picture. And, perhaps even worse, change the name of Dominic Sessa’s character and the title, and you’d be hard-pressed to believe this is a film about Anthony Bourdain.
Cinematic bio-pics of famous folks are evergreen in cinemas and at the Academy Awards, which is what “Tony” feels like it is aiming for, with its amalgam characters and fictional female love interest who can’t help but fall for the man who lies to her at every turn. Why do we keep doing this to women in these movies, creating characters that never existed in order to play off the whims and emotional needs of the man who very much did? Between “A Complete Unknown” and “Springsteen”, among other offenders, it makes one question the value of having a love interest in these movies at all. It isn’t as if the man ever warrants the care that is given to them. Tony, as presented in the film, is wayward and well-intentioned, but he is certainly not as charming as the movie believes him to be; lying not only to Nancy but also to Banderas’ Chef about who he is, where he’s from, and his whole purpose for wasting the time of everyone around him. There are moments when Johnson allows the dirtbag nature of Bourdain to shine through, particularly in sequences where his newfound friend and enabler, Sal (Leo Woodall), shows Tony the finer points of cocaine, heroin, and general mischief. Between Sal and Chef, Tony has a clearly defined angel and demon sitting on each shoulder; an obvious thematic demarcation of Bourdain’s warring nature in real life. Still, the movie is much too kind to Tony; casting this whirlwind Summer where he essentially wrecks the lives of those around him as something for him to build upon, to grow beyond, centralizing his own wants and needs without suffering any real consequences. Provincetown may as well be a dream he had, falling asleep in one form and waking up another; a Little Nemo-esque transformation that evolves him from a pretentious would-be writer into an earnest and industrious devotee of the kitchen. One sequence late in the film, when Tony’s attempts to woo Nancy with his culinary prowess lead to catastrophe, presents a mania that the rest of the film could have aspired to; showcasing the lingering aftermath of his lies and self-serving nature foisted upon those with the ill luck to be around him. Yet, the moment soon passes, and the easy-to-digest romanticism resumes post haste; leading to another tired trope of these kinds of films where a beloved mentor figure says offhandedly that Tony should consider going by “Anthony” as it seems more grown-up. And thus, the Anthony Bourdain as we know it is born. For a man who side-stepped easy categorization for the majority of his too-short life, it just feels wrong to paint him as a cliché on the silver screen. The man deserved better, and frankly so do we.
“Tony” is a handsome movie if not a lasting one. Here’s hoping that Johnson, a fantastic filmmaker whose work everyone should seek out, has gotten this type of storytelling out of his system and can go back to doing what he does best: serving cinema that is as delicious as it is audacious, a filmmaker and artist after Anthony Bourdain’s own heart.
As for “Tony”, best to send it back to the kitchen.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Tony” is playing at The Broad Theater and Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
