Guest Contributor: Debbie Cerda
As a longtime fan of travel and food shows, I enjoyed watching “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” and the “Parts Unknown” over the years. I have to admit that I have not yet read Kitchen Confidential, so I went into Tony less as a devotee than most. I was a bit curious what a fictionalized portrait would reveal about a guy whose whole persona was built on narrating his own life. Turns out that this film directed by Matt Johnson and co-written with Lou Howe, Matthew Miller, and Todd Bartels, earns that curiosity and delivers.
Set in 1976, Tony follows 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa), who wants to be a writer and diverts into a Cape Cod kitchen for the summer after he’s learned that he did not receive a fellowship at Vassar. Under the wing of a Brazilian-born restaurateur named Ciro – portrayed by Antonio Banderas in what might be the best supporting turn of the year – Tony gets pulled into the chaos and low-grade criminality that calcified into his persona. Leo Woodall portrays Sal, a cook so gloriously incompetent he makes Tony look like a prodigy by comparison. He provides a bit of comic relief along with the stark reality of life in the service industry which the film leans on but never abuses.
What struck me most about Tony is how well it is crafted. Cinematographer Michael Bauman’s close shots create a rather intimate connection to Tony’s world. The color and hue contrast in the art design is so deftly balanced that I was reminded of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s films, with a bit of the saturated, tactile warmth Amélie is known for. Even the night beach scenes receives the same devotion to color and light, dropping the audience into the 1970s without winking at the period the way lesser films do. The props and sets receive the same care and attention, from the bottle of Joy dishwashing liquid in the kitchen to …
The performances match the quality of the film’s craftsmenship. Sessa deftly plays Bourdain arrogant and self-mythologizing, and it’s what separates Tony from the parade of “great man” biopics that flatten their subjects into posters. Banderas quietly steals the film out from under everyone; Ciro is written and played as a real mentor, not a device. The score, from Jay McCarrol (Johnson’s regular collaborator on Nirvana the Band the Show), does its quietest work between the classic-rock needle drops.
If there’s a place I wanted more, it’s the women: Nancy (Emilia Jones) could use more room to breathe, and Tony’s mother another layer. A small gap in an otherwise generous, well-observed film.
Johnson refuses to sand down Bourdain’s rougher edges just because we know how the story ends. This isn’t hagiography, and that restraint along with Sessa’s performance manages to make an imperfect kid become someone worth watching for two hours. Tony has convinced me that this origin story deserved exactly this loving, occasionally messy send-off – and to add Kitchen Confidential to my summer reading list.