Anthony Bourdain had a discerning eye.
Anyone who has watched him on “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” or read his musings in “Kitchen Confidential,” can see that. Part of what made Bourdain so fun to watch was his sense of curiosity – about people, about the world, about food, and the intersections between those things.
His discernment is evident in “Tony,” Matt Johnson’s movie based on the early chapters of “Kitchen Confidential,” following a teenage Bourdain’s summer working at a Provincetown fish shack. But it’s less so curiosity that drives young Tony’s (Dominic Sessa) gaze, and more wary aspiration.
In his first days in the tiny kitchen where he’ll spend the majority of the summer, his eyes bounce around, taking in the chaos. He watches his fellow cooks rag on each other, making crass jokes and playing meaner-than-appropriate pranks (including tricking Tony into picking up a piping hot pan sans oven mitt). These cooks (played by Leo Woodall, Stavros Halkias, and Michael Jibrin) are terrible, in so many ways. But there’s a sense of camaraderie between them – a code, a connection, a measure of coolness that Tony (alone, abrasive, awkward) yearns for. So, he watches. But, as the film wears on, the question becomes is he noticing the right things?
At its core, “Tony” is a coming-of-age story – and, to its credit, one that works fairly well even if you don’t know that its subject goes on to be one of the most beloved media figures of the 21st century (or maybe, ever). Since Bourdain’s death in 2018, there have been numerous attempts to reckon with the tragedy of his loss. But “Tony” is more successful than most because it doesn’t attempt to psychoanalyze that loss, or the man himself. That’s not to say it doesn’t engage with the myth of Bourdain – it certainly does. But its ability to lean into and deftly execute coming-of-age story tropes maps Tony’s summer in the Cape onto a desire we’re all familiar with – the desire to be the coolest person in the room. And “Tony” hypothesizes that cool is more than a vibe – it’s passion, it’s hard work, and it’s care.
The vision of Bourdain that those of us who watched him on television have in our heads is, essentially, a rock star – effortlessly cool, a bit of a bad boy, but with a real empathetic soul behind that edge. But “Tony” kicks off with a famous Bourdain quote that promises a different person altogether: “I was to be frank, a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good *ss kicking.”
When we first meet Tony, we meet a kid determined to skip everything about life that he deems bullsh*t. He’s sitting in front of a trio of old men, outlining his plans for a book to this Vassar College fellowship committee – something overly pretentious, imagining a series of conversations between George Orwell and Jack Kerouac. He sells them the nonsensical idea, then laughs about it later with a friend at a bar, guffawing about how he can’t believe that the committee took his bullsh*t idea so seriously (spoiler alert: they didn’t. He doesn’t get the fellowship).
But not getting the fellowship doesn’t stop Tony. He lies to his parents, telling them he got the fellowship, and then promptly follows his longstanding crush, Nancy (Emilia Jones) to where she’s working for the summer in Provincetown. He tells Nancy he’ll be working on his novel all summer long (a lie). He tells the head chef and owner of the restaurant (Antonio Banderas, simply known as Chef) that he’s worked in a kitchen before (another lie). His philosophy, it seems, is lie first, learn later. All of this will eventually come back to bite him.
But until then, he will continue to lie, determined to make himself look cool first and work on it later. He continues to watch those around him, searching for the coolest guy in the room and studying him relentlessly. That guy materializes in the form of fellow cook and oyster shucker extraordinaire Sal (Leo Woodall). On the surface, Sal encapsulates all the things that a 19-year-old from New Jersey in the 1970s might find cool. Consider his introduction: One morning, looking handsomely disheveled and just the right amount of greasy, he pops an oyster into his mouth, immediately throws it back up, and then throws a saucy wink at Tony from across their shared workspace before cheerily calling him the f-slur.
That moment captures Sal in a nutshell – charming, problematic, and impossibly alluring to a guy like Tony. Sal is an archetype we often see in boy-centric coming-of-age stories, from “Dazed and Confused” to “Snack Shack” – the older, gracious but troubled guy who takes our protagonist under his wing. They take on the summer at a running leap – sometimes literally, jumping off the docks into the ocean, all gangly limbs and joy, the texture and color of those moments amplified by Michael Bauman’s tactile cinematography. But, as Tony will come to learn (in a slightly heavy handed, coming-of-age way) Sal is a shortcut kind of guy. This is a guy who makes notches in doorframes after he has sex with a girl. This is a guy who will steal from a drunkard on the street, who’s always itching to start a fight. And this is also a guy with a pretty serious heroin problem, one that colors the rest of his relationships when it rears its ugly head.
The film is characterized by not only Tony’s relationship with Sal, but also his relationship with Chef, and the push and pull therein. Woodall and Banderas’ performances are emblematic of this tension – Woodall’s showy, almost abrasive charm compared with Banderas’ far more naturalistic, smooth tendencies. Sal’s inclination towards ease and shortcuts also comes into conflict with Chef’s penchant for hard work, something Tony (who’s crashing on Chef’s couch) learns one weekend when he watches Chef make his own sea salt and crush tomatoes to make his own ketchup. These scenes are almost achingly tender in their execution. It’s not just that Chef values hard work – he seems to really love it.
Tony’s arc, then, becomes about learning for himself what “cool” really means. As Tony, Sessa has a stark intensity that seems to be too strong for his physical being. Especially early on, every emotion is underlined by a simmering anger, a deep contradiction in his confidence. He yearns to be an adult, but he has a backwards idea of what that actually means. He thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room, but it’s all an act – a faux-intellectualism that betrays the fact that he’s not all that passionate about anything. He’d rather give the appearance of being smart than be smart. This is made clear in an early scene revolving around Tony’s troubled relationship with his mother (Dagmara Domińczyk). He yearns for her approval, but she can see through the act. Her eyes are just as discerning as his. She knows he’s faking it.
But as Tony spends more time with Chef, sparks of the myth of Anthony Bourdain – a myth that thrives on authenticity – start to become apparent. Even Sessa’s performance starts to settle. Tony’s working harder, but the tension in his body starts to release, evolving into something less jittery and a little more relaxed. Chef’s status as a mentor – as the mentor, at least in this film, who taught Tony that good work and coolness can’t be rushed – solidifies, and this is where Johnson most leans into the Anthony Bourdain mythos.
After an impromptu, middle-of-the-night striper run (as beautiful a fishing sequence as you’ll ever see), Chef, Tony, and the rest of the fishermen cook their catches around a campfire on the beach in the middle of the night. It evokes countless moments of Bourdain on television, sitting around a shoddy table in a chair he’s too big for in the middle of a bustling city or a small town, eating delicious food and chatting with the people who made it. Life isn’t just about hard work, but enjoying the fruits of those labors. When you take shortcuts, you miss out – on good food, on passion, on caring about something other than yourself. And isn’t that the coolest thing of all?
