‘There are 1.5 sex scenes, and the food looks just fine’
Simran Hans reviews Tony, a film which has little to do with the life of Anthony Bourdain
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles. In today’s newsletter, Simran Hans reviews Tony, the new film loosely based on the early life of Anthony Bourdain,
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‘There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible,’ wrote Emily Wilson in her already-infamous LRB review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. In Tony, an adaptation of a different hallowed text – Kitchen Confidential, the bestselling memoir of the late chef and writer Anthony Bourdain – there are 1.5 sex scenes, and the food looks just fine: two of the many problems with the film
Kitchen Confidential, which was published in 2000 when Bourdain was forty-four, remains a darkly funny and lusty book. In the early chapters (which form the basis of Tony), Bourdain writes of the ‘pleasurable shock’ of cold, creamy Vichyssoise on holiday in France with his parents, and his first oyster, a ‘glistening, vaguely sexual-looking object, still dripping and nearly alive’. It is the inner monologue of a self-declared sensualist, of someone greedy for experience and animated by joie de vivre.
Canadian director Matt Johnson’s Tony is not a film about Bourdain’s appetite. Rather, it’s a sometimes charming, mostly anodyne coming-of-age movie about an obnoxious middle-class teenager named Tony (Dominic Sessa) who spends the summer of 1975 in Provincetown, Cape Cod, in eager pursuit of a girl. He is forced to get a job as a pot washer at a seafood shack, The Flagship, where he shucks oysters, crashes on the hammock of the monastic head chef (known as Chef), and finds himself enamoured with the pirate crew who run the restaurant. Under the tutelage of Chef (Antonio Banderas), Tony begins to enjoy the rigour and the ritual of service and learns the value of being on time for work. In short: it’s a summer that might belong to anyone.
Origin stories about famous people are tricky. They need to somehow plant the recognisable kernels of a persona before the persona is fully formed. When I think of Bourdain the persona, I think of his curiosity, his sexuality, his uncommon way with people. Like many, I think of his travelogue Parts Unknown, which used conversation over a meal to explore history, culture and politics. Those aspects of Bourdain are deliberately in short supply here. The film’s narrow focus limits the story, meaning that it doesn’t have to – or want to – cover the breadth, drama and complexity of Bourdain’s life.