“Some films are slices of life,” Alfred Hitchcock observed. “Mine are slices of cake.” Food metaphors just pour out of Matt Johnson’s “Tony,” the first installment of chef-cultural ambassador Anthony Bourdain’s life story. But a no-nonsense description fits the film as well as Bourdain himself.
Johnson zeroes in on one formative summer of 1975, when Tony (Dominic Sessa) the name Bourdain went by then is a Vassar College student who doesn’t lack for confidence that he’ll be the next Great Bildungsroman Writer (he lacks the self-awareness to realize he’ll be living one instead). When a denied fellowship dashes that hope, he burns his summer vacation offering up the girl (Emilia Jones’ Nancy) to Provincetown. And what better way to begin than with what the Bourdain quote in the epigraph assures us: the kid needed an ass-kicking, and Johnson delivers.
Tony Skips the Legend and Finds Anthony Bourdain in a Provincetown Dish Pit
It’s funny that the film ends with Sessa adopting the name the world will come to recognize as Anthony Bourdain in a way that’s so telegraphed it has to be a tongue-in-cheek moment, because this is certainly not a “Anthony Bourdain: Origins” movie. The script (Johnson, Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, Matthew Miller) alludes to the man without dropping the wink or the foreshadowing.
Bourdain didn’t end up in the culinary arts by divine right but by pugnacity, and he finds himself thanks to a friendly restaurateur (Antonio Banderas) with a place to crash (remarkably, something he hadn’t even considered when he up and left) in exchange for washing dishes in the kitchen. The totem pole becomes his curriculum, and he’ll be making things with his hands instead of writing about them on the page. Because Johnson keeps the camera sealed inside this moment nicely routinized by editors Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch the misery is bereft of the flattering distance of memory that would turn it into mettle-tested good. It hits instead with the aimlessness and annoyance and awesome that it must have in that moment.
“Tony” is less interested in what Bourdain would become than in the becoming, luxuriating in the people and places Bourdain adored. Johnson is most effective in the loose hangout sequences with the kitchen crew, where Stavros Halkias is reliably amusing and Leo Woodall drops the bomb as Sal, a cocky oyster shucker whose fast talk sounds like a recipe for Bourdain’s swagger.
Johnson’s role isn’t called for much beyond Angus Tully in “Holdovers,” but the reheats are tasty (especially when Johnson and cinematographer Michael Bauman linger on Bourdain’s quiet unhappiness), and Jay McCarrol’s wistful score reminds us that “Tony” is as much a movie about letting go as it is about finding something new.
Tony is less interested in what Bourdain would become than in the becoming, luxuriating in the people and places Bourdain adored.
The rest of the sadness comes from dramatic irony, but Johnson doesn’t allow the hindsight to cloud the occurrences. Johnson embraces and rejects the revisionist “Great Man” biopic (the one that swaps the cradle-to-the-grave tale for just one illustrative incident). Knowing there’s more cake isn’t necessary for the slice to fill you up. It’s plenty sweet as is.
Grade: B+
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Tony
A 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain travels to Provincetown and stumbles into the chaotic world of a restaurant kitchen, setting off a summer that will shape the course of his life.
Director
