A movie that hits like a meal, Tony puts aside the expected biopic approach of taking a life, extracting juicy tidbits and anecdotes, and then assembling those bits in an unchallenging fashion to yield a certain number of joys and pains and lessons learned. I can’t speak to how accurate this film from Matt Johnson (Blackberry, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie) is to the specifics of the acclaimed writer and chef’s life, but it feels grounded in the spirit of Anthony Bourdain’s writing and persona, and the end result is a movie that stays with you like a night of fine dining.
Anyone currently in recovery should consider themselves warned — the film doesn’t glamorize drugs and alcohol, but rather depicts them as signifiers of habit. And that line between experimentation and habit is a line this film is very interested in exploring, and not just in terms of controlled substances — there is real time and effort put into the intricate process of figuring out who you are as a moral person. As a young Bourdain, Dominic Sessa (from The Holdovers) does a great job of finding that Kubrickian uncertainty that keeps the viewer from being able to know exactly where this guy is operating from, and how many times it can take making the wrong choice before you finally make the right one.
The young Bourdain, a student at Vassar prone to falling into fabulism and exasperation with the structures around him, ends up shuffling off to Provincetown, Mass., after a writing fellowship falls through — and his only motivation is getting to know Nancy (Emilia Jones), a coed who has become his object of fixation. Once there, he battles economics, his own pride and a nature that could honestly see him become a supervillain if not for the intervention of good food and humanity.
Thankfully, there is Chef. It’s not really a surprise that having an Antonio Banderas in your life can help right some precarious wrongs, and this gracious father figure offers young Tony a place in his kitchen, which he is neither prepared for nor humble enough to properly accept. But it’s a start, and it’s the place where Johnson’s film finds its vibe. I never got the Leo Woodall thing before, but here, as the charmingly depraved (and way taller than you’d thought) Sal, he makes an impression. He’s a tempter, but every figuring-yourself-out narrative needs a devil on the shoulder. Banderas’ Chef serves aspirational grace and the kind of reinforced pragmatism that always surfaces when awards season rolls around.
And then, as befits the secret weapon of arthouse mavericks and accomplished weirdos the world over, comedian and podcaster Stavros Halkias is there to keep things earthy, grounded and filthy, and it’s glorious. He’s got a laugh that carbonates a movie the way Marilyn Burns’ or Marlon Wayans’ scream does — effortlessly kicking things up a gear. Tony doesn’t take the approach of 2023’s The Taste of Things, but there is some time devoted to the actual process of cooking — the countless little steps that lead to hearty deliciousness — and that’s a captivating place to spend little chunks of the film here and there. This is a film that will make you want quality seafood, ideally prepared with all the strong emotions.
Provincetown feels alive in this film, and it looks amazing. If this film — with cinematography by frequent Paul Thomas Anderson collaborator Michael Bauman — is shot digitally, it does an incredible job of making itself look like mid-’70s film stock. Between this and this year’s Mary Oliver doc Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (which is deeply moving and proves everyone needs a friend like John Waters), I can see P-Town visits on the upswing for anyone wanting to steep in the liberation and beauty of a place that has spoken to so many people for so many decades, while we still have it. And as for Bourdain himself, this is a fascinating impressionist take on an interesting thinker long before the foundation was settled and the building had begun.
