Tony: Bourdain's Wet Hot Teen Summer is a Thin Bio, But a Well-Cooked Story

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B+

Tony, the putative biopic about the late, hard-living culinary rebel and globe-trotting experience-seeker Anthony Bourdain, takes a surprisingly long time to get around to the subject of food.

But then, it confines itself to a summer in the mid-‘70s, when Bourdain was merely a green 19-year-old troublemaker and adept, self-serving liar. Given that raw material, Canadian director Matt Johnson delivers a movie that often evokes Animal House in a crab shack kitchen.

In Johnson’s hands, the young Bourdain’s story is a quite fun, funny and ultimately touching watch.

Antonio Banderas as The Chef mentors a young Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) on the basics

It’s also about 50% BS, which shouldn’t surprise anybody because it’s a movie, not a documentary. But we live in a time when a summer box office champ has Greek gods and monsters and is criticized for not being historically accurate.

So, it’ll be sacrilege to some that a young Bourdain is seen cutting his hand while learning how to shuck an oyster – when the real Bourdain was taught how to shuck them as a child by his uncle in France.

I wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t decided to read Bourdain’s autobiographical book Kitchen Confidential before seeing the movie. Nor would I be aware that Johnson’s tidy script merges/invents some characters, and takes events and incidents that happened in different restaurants at different times and had them happen in this Provincetown, Massachusetts crab shack where Bourdain first got paid to cook.

But knowing that, do I care? No. It’s hard to imagine there’ll be very many people who see this movie unaware of the public figure Tony Bourdain would become and the adventures that awaited him. And the fact that Tony the movie is part rom-com, with a redemptive last act, is the price you pay to see this slice of Bourdain’s life in a theatre near you.

In real life, redemption wasn’t a game Bourdain played until way later. But hey, whatever keeps three acts afloat.

What makes Tony work, besides the skilled comedic hand of its director, is the movie’s star Dominic Sessa, who gave a soul to the surly young misfit he played opposite Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers. In some ways, he readapts that soul for his portrayal here of another surly young misfit.

In Tony, cooking, and later chef-dom, is something Bourdain stumbled onto as he connived to land a young woman from Vassar named Nancy (Emilia Jones), who would later become his wife. The sensory experience of food, which was already burned into his young brain, isn’t really communicated here. The exception is a nighttime scene, vivid in the book, of a sudden massive run of striped bass, which had every cook, chef and fisherman in Provincetown getting out of bed and practically plucking buckets of delicacies out of the water. Manna from the sea!

Antonio Banderas excels as the world-weary Brazilian chef who becomes the rookie Bourdain’s mentor, a character who is an amalgam of many such mentors, but is convincingly real. His character is an ocean of wise and steely calm surrounded by anarchic and often self-destructive characters.

Which brings us to a “mentor” of another sort. Sal (Leo Woodall), an actual real-life Bourdain kitchen character with an insatiable appetite for drugs, booze and wildly crossing the line (the wedding scene was not made up, at least not by the movie’s writers). His misadventures inspire Tony in the worst way, making him the devil on his shoulder as he considers whether to follow the dark or the light.

Knowing that Bourdain would eventually follow both with equal fervor is a, well, what’s the opposite of a backstory?

In any case, Tony is a movie, barely a biography, but an entertaining, anarchic and funny time spent at the theatre.

Tony. Directed and co-written by Matt Johnson. Stars Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas and Emilia Jones. In theatres August 14.