Anybody who’s ever done restaurant work knows that you grow up fast in a kitchen.
The speed and urgency, the pressure cooker of it all — people thrown together in hot, confined spaces, trying to work in concert with each other without injuring themselves or each other or poisoning the customers, it’s a bubble life out of time, where the hundred deadlines a day can dictate your life’s path — who you sleep with and what pharmaceutical compromises you make just to make it from prep to closing time.
Anthony Bourdain knew this world better than most. He lived in it and then wrote about it, first with his blockbuster tell-all “Kitchen Confidential,” and then in the decades of TV food and travel shows that spun out of that culinary success.
He stressed respect for those “honored” to do this work — feeding the public — all through his writing and public pronouncements. And despite his carefully cultivated hipster/traveller/chef image, he’d let slip the cost of this grueling lifestyle while playing up the commitment it takes to thrive in it.
“Tony” is a thoroughly entertaining biography of the bookish dishwasher who became a chef, a man and a man of letters. Everything fans came to love about him is here — dashing Leonard Cohen look-alike, a world-weary traveller, sucking down another smoke, voice-over narrating with wit and an ear for old film noir style in the gravelly voice and performative cool of hosting exotic travel programs.
Matt Johnson, who made the equally entertaining and just as conventional “Blackberry” movie, takes us back to the mid ’70s, when a mop-topped, entitled poseur who loved calling himself a “writer” first struck a pose and came of age. This college kid talked the talk and lied the lies — all great writers are liars and “unreliable narrators” — and dropped literary names and the German word “bildungsroman” to describe what he planned to write and what he — by accident — actually wrote.
He was “coming of age” in his teens. But he really grew up when he had the life experience to “write what you know.” And what he knew was cooking and kitchens and Michelin stars and great food the world over.
We meet the upper middle class Jersey kid with Bruce Lee and New York Dolls posters in his room — and a very big globe at the foot of his bed — just as he’s throwing “I’m a writer, now” around and telling one and all he’s got this writing fellowship at Vassar in the bag.
The globe? That helps him “imagine” fantastical places “I’ll probably never” visit.
Dominic Sessa of “The Holdovers” and “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t” gets the awkwardness that 19 year old Tony Bourdain — “Only my mother calls me ‘Anthony.'” — figures his new status allows him to shake. That cute upperclasswoman (Emilia Jones) he had a crush on in high school? He comes right up to her in an approach both brazen and delusional.
He’s got nunchucks shoved down his pants, for Pete’s sake.
But maybe he’ll make some headway with her in the fall, at Vassar. Because he’s a writer destined for great things. And when he doesn’t get that fellowship? He lies to his family (Dagmara Dominczykm plays his bookish, hard-to-please mother and Leo Woodall of “Mad Men” is his dad). And he sets out to Provincetown on Cape Cod, because that’s where the fair Nancy will be spending her summer.
Seeing her in the arms of a cook at the pizza joint that’s her summer job sends him on a loutish, beer-fueled bender. And that’s how he ends up under the care of this demanding Portugeuse chef at The Flagship seafood house.
Continue reading
Movie Nation 