Newz“Tony,” the Anthony Bourdain biopic, is a coming-of-age tale for a modern culinary giant. Set over just a summer, it’s also clearly an appetizer. And like all first courses, it leaves you with a nice first taste — but still hungry.
Director and co-writer Matt Johnson has frustratingly taken liberties with a formative period in Bourdain’s life, but still only manages to tell the story of how a callow lad became somewhat of a less callow lad after toiling in a restaurant kitchen on Cape Cod in 1975. In “Tony,” the world-weary, forever romantic, noodle-slurping Bourdain that we would fall in love with decades later via travel shows like “Parts Unknown” stays firmly out of grasp. What’s perhaps most frustrating is that this could have been a fine movie without Bourdain at its center at all.
Who doesn’t like a good coming of age? Why did it have to be Bourdain if Bourdain never gets to be Bourdain? Dominic Sessa plays the teenage chef-traveler as an angular misfit, his tall frame hunched, peering at people through a mop of unruly curls, his chin forever jutted downward — a surly Bob Dylan in kitchen whites.
We rarely see moments of joy flash on his face, even for lust or food. Even a beautifully documented moment in Bourdain’s life — when the sea that summer was filled with stripers, triggering a mass fishing frenzy at night — doesn’t trigger awe. Bourdain spent two chapters talking about this time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in his star-making 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential,” and he would return in TV episodes of “A Cook’s Tour” and “Parts Unknown.” It was certainly an important time in the young Bourdain’s life, but hang too much on it and the hanger apparently collapses.
The new movie opens with a quote from “Kitchen Confidential”: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” He got that as he went from dishwasher to plating shrimp cocktails and learning the insult-based, testosterone-filled ways of the kitchen. Bourdain would develop two love affairs during this fateful summer: One, a delight for the kitchen — the pressure, the camaraderie, the artist’s heart, the pirate’s adoration of heat and knives — and, another, hard drugs. “This is where I bought my first bag of heroin,” he says in “Parts Unknown.” But, like a collapsing soufflé, i…
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