Tony Is Missing the Main Ingredient
Making a movie about Anthony Bourdain before he became Anthony Bourdain is a gamble. Strip away the television shows, the books, the celebrity and the beautifully weaponized cynicism, and you are left with a 19-year-old kid who has not yet earned his own Wikipedia page, let alone a feature film.
The poster for Tony looks like we’re about to be thrown into the heat and insanity of a packed New York kitchen. The kind of place where chefs scream and someone is always two seconds away from either producing a masterpiece or launching a sauté pan at the sous chef. Instead, Tony delivers “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.” I know this essay intimately. I read it dozens of times as a teacher. It arrived every September with the reliability of seasonal allergies. “I went here. I ate this. My cousin came. We went swimming. The hotel had a pool. The End.” Chronologically impeccable. Spiritually vacant. Apparently someone found one of those essays, gave it a production budget and called A24. We spend much of the movie in a tired summer restaurant whose central dramatic question becomes: Has anyone from Public Health seen this place? Not exactly Kitchen Confidential. More Kitchen Questionable.
For all the time it spends with Tony, the movie never quite finds Anthony Bourdain. Instead, we get Tony the screwup and Tony the smart-ass. What we rarely see is the spark that makes you understand how this guy eventually becomes Anthony Bourdain. Dominic Sessa is good. He is loose, irritating and completely convincing as a teenager who believes sophistication consists largely of acting unimpressed. But I never entirely believed I was watching Anthony Bourdain. At times, Sessa seems less like a future culinary outlaw than a lanky character who wandered out of a Gordon Korman novel, missed the bus home and somehow wound up washing dishes for the summer.
Antonio Banderas, meanwhile, walks into the movie and demonstrates the difference between having dialogue and having presence. He is terrific. Warm without becoming cuddly, eccentric without becoming decorative and authoritative without announcing himself as “The Mentor.” Banderas creates a man who appears to have existed long before Tony wandered into his kitchen and will continue existing long after Tony leaves. Then there is Stavros Halkias. Halkias possesses that very rare comic gift where he can make an entrance feel like a punchline. Some actors need a great joke. Halkias needs only a doorway. Could he become a Zach Galifianakis-style scene-stealer? Absolutely.
Is Tony a biography? A coming-of-age movie? A romance? A workplace comedy? An origin story? Yes. No. Maybe. Apparently nobody knows. Least of all Tony. It tries on five different movies and somehow commits to none of them. Even the score seems anxious that we might accidentally enjoy ourselves. It is dreary and repetitive, drifting through scene after scene like a guidance counsellor who has cornered you after class to discuss your five-year plan.
Then, almost offensively late, something happens. Tony tries to get into the CIA—the Culinary Institute of America, not the other one, although at this point an espionage subplot might at least have picked up the pace. Suddenly I sat up. There he is. Ambition. Direction. The first glimpse of the man I came to see…then…credits. Excuse me? You finally put dinner on the table and now the restaurant is closing?
Anthony Bourdain deserved something messier, sharper and hungrier. He became famous because he refused to stay on the surface. He wanted to know what people ate, how they lived, what they believed, who cooked the food and what happened behind the door marked STAFF ONLY.
He dug.
Tony barely scratches.
The movie gives us Tony.
I wanted the hunger.