Inside a Screening of ‘Tony,’ Anthony Bourdain’s Biopic, for Restaurant Workers Only | Anto…

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Antonio Banderas’s Acts of Faith

I saw “Tony,” the new bio-pic about Anthony Bourdain, earlier this summer, at a private screening attended largely by people in the world of hospitality and food media, many of whom, myself included, knew the real Bourdain. Food people are normally a raucous, emotive bunch, but there was a tightness in the air as folks arrived and took their seats. Pretty much everyone in the room admitted, in murmurs and whispers, that we were nervous about the film—that it would be superficial, or dehumanizingly hagiographic, or else just sort of clunkily bad, in the way that bio-pics often are, relying overmuch on a viewer’s knowledge of who the movie’s subject was and would become. But the director of “Tony,” Matt Johnson, wisely constrains his story—loosely based on a few early chapters of “Kitchen Confidential,” with its narrative arc fairly fictionalized—to one mid-seventies summer. We follow a college-age Bourdain as he bums around Provincetown, trying to be a writer and working his first kitchen job, and the result turns out to be a sharp, intelligent film. (“It’s a bildungsroman,” a nerdily angelic, beautifully stupid young Tony explains to a panel of white-haired professors in the movie’s opening scene, petitioning for funding for a novel he plans to write. It sure is, kid.)

Tony | Audience Reviews

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