We Do Have Reservations About That Tony Trailer

Remember the last time there was a film about Anthony Bourdain? Prior to its release, Roadrunner the documentary got into a controversy over the use of Artificial Intelligence to recreate three lines of undeclared narration in Bourdain’s voice. Eventually, the film did well, also receiving critical acclaim, as the controversy underwent some dilution.

Much like the 2005 TV show about the late celebrity chef, which starred Bradley Cooper, and was unapologetically titled Kitchen Confidential. It was the title of Bourdain’s life-changing book that continues to be quoted and celebrated across the world. Based on his unsolicited submission “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” to The New Yorker in 1999, Kitchen Confidential was a memoir like no other, capturing the unglamorous realities of fine-dining restaurant kitchens.

Bourdain, who tragically died by suicide in 2018, influenced legions of young, inveterate artists and iconoclasts. Tall, with a raspy baritone and unendingly charismatic, the chef was a true superstar if there ever was one. Which is why the trailer of Tony, the new A24 biopic on him, underwhelmed us massively. In about two-and-a-half minutes, you witness the chef-TV host’s gruelling formative years and rise to popularity in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

The first gripe is that the film seems to have submitted to the inevitability of ‘featurising’ the life of a jaggedly real personality, something that fans grew so one with. Most of him came to us through his documentary-style TV shows, where he never whitewashed the reality of visiting places or regimes. A thoroughly unsparing man, Bourdain was particularly, if in a tough-love sort of way, harsh on himself.

On one No Reservations episode, Bourdain, riddled with killing back pain from his life as a chef and also from the occupational hazard of constantly having to travel, joked that he was “chewing Vicodin like Twizzlers just to be able to walk upright”.

In Kitchen Confidential, he famously called himself a “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout… badly in need of a good ass-kicking”.

And, of course, the following sentence that even an acolyte as big as me has grown slightly tired of reading on Instagram fan pages:

“Your body is not a temple. It’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”

It’s so wrong on so many levels and, ultimately, it’s so right. So prophetic. That’s the Tony we know. That kind of tough-love reflection was something that crystallised itself with Bourdain’s memory. He was self-awareness without the performance—at least what we knew of him.

Perhaps his talent for that wry self-deprecation came later in life, perhaps not. All we’re saying is, seeing a guy we loved warts and all in a doe-eyed, romantically lost-boy avatar is going to be a bit of a bummer. Biopics have a weird way of flattening personality and realism into justifications of the corny kind, and the way Tony’s shot and written—at least from the trailer—seems exactly that. He doesn’t need the justification that making a mainstream film from the POV of the central figure usually foists on the subject. Perhaps he was the thoughtless, narcissistic, spoiled lout that he said he was.

If one truly knows Bourdain, maybe leaning into his recognition of teenage fecklessness would have worked. Maybe, maybe not.

Getting another Anthony Bourdain movie in five years feels a little too much. We can probably keep rewatching the man we knew, as we knew him, on YouTube. The attempt to immortalise in a biopic a figure who, we can all agree, cannot be played with enough similarity. And for what it’s worth, Bourdain did a good job of immortalising himself in the Kitchen Confidential audiobook.

This writer liked Sessa in The Holdovers, Alexander Payne’s heartwarming Christmas movie with a deliciously irate Paul Giamatti. He played the defiant, troubled kid to perfection and with him being a few years older for this character, something about might even make him pass for Bourdain. However, him going around insisting that he’s a writer, he’s a writer, he’s a writer, seems pathetically vanilla for a man like Tony.