Tony Review: A Fresh Take on Bourdain's Youth — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:02] >> [music] >> Matt Johnson's Tony focuses on a few chapters in the life of Anthony Bourdain from his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.

[00:14] During a summer spent in Cape Cod in the 1970s, a teenage Tony learns for the first time that food, travel, and culture might be his forte. However, the late chef is hardly painted with a saintly brush. In fact, actor Dominic

[00:28] Sessa of The Holdovers builds on minor details from the book like Bourdain's cocky swagger and the ridiculous nunchucks he kept tucked into his belt to create an [music] insolent, selfish, but ultimately driven version of a man

[00:42] I'm Siddhant Adlakha, and this is my review of Tony. >> Okay, so I'm just going to walk you through the basic vision. It's a coming-of-age story. >> The movie is a blast, ensuring that

[00:56] Johnson is two for two this year alongside his time-travel mockumentary Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie. However, the two films could not be more different in scope and style. If anything, Tony, a more measured and

[01:09] intentional work, shares its tonal DNA with Johnson's BlackBerry, an intense tale of innovators and eventual failures, which grew out of [music] the post-Social Network tech biopic boom. It also wouldn't be a stretch to call Tony

[01:22] one of the only films to truly understand and recreate what made The Social Network tick. The energy of naive youth, no matter how destructive. Part dramatic biography, part coming-of-age comedy, and wholly

[01:34] exciting, Tony begins with a highly fictionalized chapter in Bourdain's life writing fellowship at Vassar College so he can follow his high school crush Nancy, played by Emilia Jones, to Cape Cod. The self-proclaimed author has

[01:48] dreams of grandeur and waxes poetic to anyone who listen, drunkenly might I add, even if it gets him in hot water. The next thing he knows, he's working as a dishwasher in a local clam joint to make ends meet while keeping his lowly

[02:02] job a secret from his college peers and sleeping on the porch hammock of his unnamed Portuguese boss, known only as Chef, played by Antonio Banderas. The plot follows Tony's growing relationship with Nancy in the perpetual dusk of

[02:14] Provincetown. But it also sees the young teen learning Not only through his boss's passions and failures, but through the drug-fueled sexual exploits of his coworker, Sal, played by Leo Woodall.

[02:27] Every male role model in Tony's life seems to harbor a mysterious melancholy, leading to a fascinating set of performances from the cast. Woodall hides [music] an aggrieved sadness just behind his eyes, while Banderas appears

[02:40] to live with regrets he's long come to terms with. However, these are just tiny interaction [music] instead of eclipsing the central drama. the cramped kitchen is where the movie lives and [music] breathes, from the

[02:56] characters to the slow transition of Bourdain's own point of view. The film adapts only chapters two and three of Kitchen Confidential, so apart from the broad details of time and place, it may as well be fan fiction.

[03:09] Johnson injects the story with the spirit of Bourdain himself, capturing colorful writing, [music] but the gradual widening of his perspective as he begins to consider food as a [music]

[03:22] passion, an art form, and a series of local traditions. More importantly, the film reconnects the art and the artist as broad concepts, refusing to divorce creativity from even the most selfish emotional impulses.

[03:36] If The Social Network reframed Facebook as a romantic wound made manifest in isolation, Tony treats Bourdain's culinary exploits as stemming from romantic pursuit while surrounded by community.

[03:49] >> If the movie drops the ball in one notable way, it's that Nancy is never >> [music] >> making for some awkward and at times retrograde get-the-girl framing. She's the girl and Tony has to get her.

[04:05] However, the film also unfolds through the perspective of an eager teenage boy and includes all the things that a lanky drifter like Sessa Bourdain might find It moves at the speed of rose-tinted thought with careful visual compositions

[04:21] instantaneously, so they can be edited together with controlled chaos. All the Sessa makes for a fascinating centerpiece as a young man in search of himself, but with no way to find the right questions, let alone the answers,

[04:34] until he hurts those around him and learns from his mistakes. Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some, another college period piece that gazes backward in time while immersing you in its testosterone-drenched

[04:47] escapades, but with enough intellectual distance to excuse its visceral nostalgia. It grants permission, in a way, to return to a time when the world seems so large that anything could be possible,

[05:02] bore down on you with unrelenting [music] force. much as Sessa channels the spirit of Bourdain, he also resembles Johnson himself in look and fast-talking demeanor. This ensures that Tony's

[05:17] exploration of creative spark as something impure but no less valuable feels deeply personal, too, as if the film were about carving out a daring space for filmmaking in the Canadian landscape, in the way that Johnson and

[05:29] his creative partners often have. Either way, the result is a biopic laser-focused on the follies of youth and hypercharged with all its vigor. makes you want to you know? Something only you can do.

[05:43] >> And so, I'm giving Tony a nine. It's a zesty, energetic biopic about a teenage Anthony Bourdain, and Matt Johnson's second film this year. An act of controlled chaos that taps into the nostalgia of naive youth while examining

[05:56] how creativity is born. Led by an incredible ensemble, its imperfect answers make one of the finest and thorniest coming-of-age films [music] in recent years. In short, it's a blast.

[06:09] A24, and here to chat a little bit more about it, the reviewer Siddhant Adlakha. >> Hey, Clint. Thank you for having me. I'm doing well. How are you? little weird because this is one of the

[06:23] to chat like this. Like, we met before in real life, but we don't get to like feel like we work together almost constantly. >> Yeah, we've been in touch since, I want to say, the early pandemic, and uh I've

[06:36] been working for IGN since about 2018. So, this has been a a long, long time >> Yeah, I was curious about that myself, so I actually looked it up. And just in articles that you've written for IGN that have gotten page views in the last

[06:50] >> I do not. You'll have to tell me. >> 372. >> That is more than one a day. Wow. >> Yeah, more than one a day. But, that's Some of that's from previous years, but 372 of them have done traffic this year.

[07:06] most of them are. >> I might need to cut back. >> Yeah. Yeah, take it easy. But, since this is the first time we've had one of these uh particular kinds of conversations, let me ask you a quick

[07:18] Uh how'd you get into being a critic in the first place? >> I probably started writing like small little bloggy reviews on Facebook when I was maybe in high school, maybe in early college. And then uh throughout my

[07:34] college and grad school years, that slowly developed into like actual blogging. Uh and then uh I found that it terrible at and that I could get paid to do as well.

[07:46] But also, you know, it's it's just it's being part of this constant conversation and feedback loop. Something that I really really enjoy and festivals and all of that it's it's just become a regular part of my life.

[08:02] >> Yeah, dude. Your festival schedule I'm I'm more than a little jealous of. So back to Tony. You you did mention something in your viewer that I wanted to follow up on about the type of biopic it is. What is it about this sort of

[08:17] like small window approach that that you like? biopic has become kind of a genre unto itself especially if it's, you know, a known quantity. Someone who can be considered an IP or a brand. You someone

[08:33] like Michael Jackson. And then the expectation going in becomes okay, this is where they were born. This is when they grew up. So on and so forth. And it's it's very hard to tell a life to death story really really well.

[08:47] Regardless of who the subject is whether they're real whether they're fictional. life the way that Matt Johnson's Tony does you're able to distill the essence in a way. You know, and still get the point

[09:03] across about who they are and their importance in the cultural landscape. What they mean and represent to people while also telling a coherent, you know, and dramatic story. And I think that's something that Tony does in incredible

[09:17] and also really unexpected ways. >> Yeah, I do like the idea of just picking like a moment from somebody's life and and presenting that is sort of a, you know, more broadly illustrative of that person. Who they were like here's

[09:31] this one moment that really built this person that you heard of. You know, in >> Yeah, and and something that Johnson does that's really interesting is, you know, I mentioned in the review that it is essentially biographical fan fiction

[09:44] because apart from the fact that Bourdain spent a summer working at a kitchen in Cape Cod, everything else in this movie is more or less fictitious. But it captures the sense of time and place and the mood of who Bourdain was

[10:00] as a youngster really, really well. >> Yeah, I feel like Anthony Bourdain and and and this may be just speaking out of turn, but he always struck me as like he was very self-aware. Like even in his writing and and his shows and sort of

[10:13] just how he presented himself. It feels like he would maybe maybe he was kind of a >> Yeah, and you know, he you know, even in his later years, he

[10:27] continued to be very brisk, very brash. But when you have you know, someone who you might consider an expert in their field or maybe even a genius, you kind of understand that that brashness comes with the territory. But

[10:41] then what if you you know, you look back in time and you see him as that person but having achieved absolutely nothing, having proven absolutely nothing. Where does that that same you know, drive and that ego, where does it belong? Is it

[10:56] something you need to shed in order to get ahead? Do you lean into it? Um and I I don't think you know, Tony's necessarily looking for a black and definitely doesn't shy away from the fact that so much of Bourdain's artistry

[11:12] as you know, a food personality uh comes from his uh comes from his his snappy, witty outlook, but also at the same time his his willingness to absorb

[11:27] other people's lessons, other people's desires, their impulses. And you see a >> Yeah, that that is one of my favorite things about the show is he did No Reservations in particular that, you know, going out and meeting people seem

[11:42] to be sort of the great kind of central joy in that endeavor. away, but there's such a delightful scene in this movie where he also takes advantage of the the local history

[11:56] takes advantage of the the local history of the area and uses its food culture and its traditions to create this brilliant moment of story and character. brilliant moment of story and character. And it's just a small throwaway line in

[12:09] his book, the one that this is based on. Um and again, it's only based on two very very short chapters that you can get through in about 10 minutes. But Johnson kind of extrapolates from that and he does he performs the sort of

[12:21] textual analysis in a way where he he looks at what these chapters and this line in particular means to Bourdain and then sort of reverse engineers this >> No, it's it's a really fascinating approach to a biopic. And to your point

[12:36] about those like start to finish, birth to death kind of biopics, those always I wouldn't say always, but I feel like they have a better chance at being very surface level, you know, so being able to dig much deeper into like a narrower

[12:51] window is is, you know, I mean, it's genuinely is is my favorite >> Yeah, and if you just want a Wikipedia summary, go to Wikipedia. >> [laughter] >> Exactly. Well, thank you, man, for

[13:04] >> Exactly. Well, thank you, man, for writing about Tony and 371 other things this year. So, let's do this again. >> Absolutely. I can't wait. >> And thank you for watching Siddhant's review of Tony. For more movie reviews,

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