Canadian prankster extraordinaire Matt Johnson has been taking a much-deserved victory lap all year, having brought his cult sitcom Nirvanna the Band the Show to the big screen, his chilling found-footage comedy The Dirties to adoring Bleak Week audiences, and his burgeoning career as a go-to director for lowkey biopics up to the A24 tier of marketing & distribution. So, it’s a little surprising to find him hitting such a bummer note in his latest tale of rambunctious male bonding, a coming-of-age biopic about Anthony Bourdain’s college years. Tony finds Matt Johnson entering his sad boy era. He carries over all of the bro-ey, sinister scheming of his run & gun days shooting The Dirties, Operation Avalanche, and Nirvanna the Band, but now his buddy-comedy antics are soured by more hangovers, artistic pretension, and pensive brooding than ever before, due largely to the looming legacy of his latest subject. There’s an unavoidable sadness in depicting Bourdain’s life as a young man, given that the globally loved & respected suicide victim described himself at that age as being a “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” in a quote that Johnson dutifully transcribes in an opening title card. Some audiences might be surprised to see the notoriously swaggering Bourdain portrayed as such a scrawny, conniving little twerp in Tony, but the depiction feels true to how he portrayed himself in his career-making memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Matt Johnson appears to see a kindred spirit in the way that vulnerable little kid in Bourdain was masked by his more boisterous, smirking surface, and the recognition of it bums him out.
We spend the summer of 1975 with a college-age Bourdain on the beaches of Provincetown, Massachusetts, the same year Jaws turned that East Coast setting into an iconic moment in American pop culture. Dominic “Holdovers” Sessa plays the future celebrity chef as the saddest boy in America: an aimless, sniveling punk with no discernible motivation in life other than following around his Vassar campus crush like a puppy dog . . . until he’s hit with the realization that she already has a boyfriend. He sells himself to anyone who’ll listen as a writer of great future importance, always on the verge of writing the great American novel but never actually seen sitting in front of a typewriter. His self-aggrandizing lies & schemes in Vassar’s literary circles leave him stranded & penniless in Provincetown for the summer, where he drunkenly falls backwards into a kitchen job washing dishes for an enigmatic Brazilian chef, played by Antonio Banderas. Bourdain’s discovery of a latent love for cooking brings him to life in that kitchen, giving him something to care about other than getting the girl, pissing off his parents, or always being recognized as the smartest prick in the room. Between endless staff meals, beer runs, dirty dishes, and oyster shuckings, he forgets his scheming pursuits of his nearby crush just long enough to develop a personality that she might actually be attracted to, and it saves him from his own self-loathing inertia in the process. A Matt Johnson movie adapting Kitchen Confidential’s later chapters about Bourdain going feral in the backrooms of New York City restaurants might’ve been more fun to watch, but it also would’ve been more expected. Here, Johnson plays his usual tune entirely in minor notes, portraying Bourdain less as a one-of-a-kind culinary mind than as a textbook example of what it’s like to work in kitchens when you’re dangerously young & aimless, finding both romance and sorrow in the precarity of that state.
Once upon a time, Kitchen Confidential was the official Bible for the bro-iest chefs with knife tattoos you’d ever work alongside in professional kitchens, and Tony makes no apology for the homophobic name-calling, homoerotic horseplay, and general juvenile machismo that pervades that industry. That’s exactly what makes it fit in so snuggly with the rest of Matt Johnson’s filmography, which is just as romantic about toxic, obsessive male bonding as it is disinterested in the women who decorate those men’s lives. Johnson seems to be telling these stories from a position of personal self-examination, at least, constantly picking at whatever fragments of male adolescent psychology are still leftover in his overgrown adult-child persona, with little interest in or insight into anyone else’s worldview. Other overt Johnsonisms carry over here from previous films too, most notably in the wall-to-wall needle drops from setting-appropriate bands like The Modern Lovers, which are only occasionally interrupted by a near self-parodic score of sappy piano twinklings from longtime collaborator Jay McCarrol. Much like in BlackBerry, the period setting puts some limitations on how much of Johnson’s trademark street-level spontaneity can be carried over from his sitcoms to his biopics, and most of that job is left to comedian Stavros Halkias as Bourdain’s most obnoxious, Bluto-like coworker (a task marked clearly by his billing in the final credits as playing himself). Without those auteurist touches echoing from previous Matt Johnson works, Tony largely looks & acts like a fairly thoughtful, well-behaved biopic on an indie budget, which is how most audiences will inevitably receive it. In that context, its lowkey mood, its limitation in scope, and its pronounced disinterest in lionizing its subject all speak well to its success as a tasteful film about Bourdain’s life, when it’s all too easy to imagine what a tasteless one would look like. As a result, it’s more likely to charm than to wow. The biggest reaction it got out of the audience at its advance screening in New Orleans was in a scene when Bourdain attempts to shuck an oyster without holding it in a rag to protect his hand, a moment that the local, oyster-familiar crowd treated like a horror movie jump scare. It became clear in that moment that an overwhelming majority of the room had likely worked in kitchens at some point in our lives and, thus, could see some version of ourselves in this “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout” — a position of quiet recognition rather than one of celebrity hero worship.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 