“Tony,” the biopic released nationwide this week, will make you miss Anthony Bourdain even more than you already did. He was famous as a chef. But he was also such a good man — which feels particularly powerful at a time when we’re surrounded by the most domineering and toxic aspects of masculinity, like the defense secretary planning to screen troops for testosterone deficiency and young men smashing their chins with hammers to get a more masculine jawline.
When Bourdain died in 2018, he was considered a model of positive masculinity. He had the kind of macho swagger revered by the manosphere dudes. But on shows like “No Reservations,” he married that bravado with genuine empathy and interest in other people. So it’s fitting that “Tony,” which loosely adapts early chapters of Bourdain’s 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential,” about his first job in a kitchen, focuses less on how Bourdain became such a good chef than his evolution into a good man.
“Tony” shows the evolution of a young man toying with different archetypes of masculinity, deciding where his values lie.
“Tony,” directed by Matt Johnson, is what its protagonist would call a “building’s roman,” a coming-of-age story. It begins with a self-satisfied college-age Tony — “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless,” per the “Kitchen Confidential” quote that serves as the film’s epigraph — played by a pitch-perfect Dominc Sessa. He slouches across the screen with leather jacket and cigarettes, very much in love with the idea of himself as a brooding novelist. The narrative arc of the film is about the distance Tony must cross to become Anthony Bourdain, a man who became famous on the strength of his ability to talk to people all around the world.
Young Tony feels entitled: to acclaim, to wealth and, most troublingly, to women, whom he accosts as though they owe him something. He follows one crush to Provincetown, Massachusetts, on a whim over his summer break from Vassar College. When he sees she already has a boyfriend, he gets drunk at a bar and tries to get handsy with the waitress. At home, his withholding mother talks down to him (she knows how to spell Bildungsroman), and Tony seems to feel that having a girlfriend will redeem him from his mother’s scorn. He cannot quite grasp the idea of women as real and individual people, with priorities outside of his own desires.
He cannot grasp hold of the idea of service workers as their own people, either. Except for the waitress he eyes, all the kitchen and restaurant workers Tony interacts with in the film’s early scenes are faceless, their heads cropped out of the frame, their voices a blur. All that is real to Tony are people like himself: young, male and well educated.
Rejection chastises Tony. Unable to land the summer writing fellowship he wanted, he instead winds up scrubbing dishes in a seafood joint, swapping labor for the chance to sleep on a hammock on the chef’s porch. (Chef is played by Antonio Banderas at his most twinkly-eyed.) In the kitchen, Tony becomes enchanted with bad-boy oyster shucker Sal (Leo Woodall), who’s just as smooth with a pickup line as he is with a knife. Under Sal’s tutelage, Tony is like a 2020s teenager studying Andrew Tate’s womanizing tips. He learns how to flirt with women but not how to respect them. He doesn’t respect most people at this point. He’s ashamed to work in a kitchen.
When Sal begins to dabble in hard drugs and hard crimes, Tony sways toward Chef’s more disciplined auspices. He picks up good work habits and a sensuous love of food. Still, laboring as a dishwasher or even a sous chef doesn’t match Tony’s sense of himself as a literary intellectual. He tries to push Chef to elevate his simple tourist fare into something elaborate and French so that his crush will take the place seriously, and he laughs at the idea of pursuing a career in food. After all, he’s going to college.
The Anthony Bourdain of multiseason shows such as “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown” would one day teach Americans that the most delicious food was sometimes to be found in the least refined of places. Viewers would watch him travel the world and treat everyone he encountered with empathy. So it’s jarring watching “Tony” and imagining that its star would ever behave with such casual disdain for other people and their work. But this Tony has not yet become that Anthony Bourdain.
“Tony” shows the evolution of a young man toying with different archetypes of masculinity, deciding where his values lie and determining what it will take for him to live them out. He has to make more than one monumental mistake — lying to and stealing from people who trust him — before he finds the activities that will give his life meaning: cooking in community, for and surrounded by others, to bring people together.
That’s the version of masculinity that Bourdain exemplified, the one that makes him such a deeply missed foil to such “high-T” fans as Donald Trump and his ilk. Bourdain became the kind of man who didn’t prioritize accumulating wealth and fame and women but focused on using what he had to tend to the community around him. He celebrated other people who did the same. The joy and beauty of “Tony” is that it gives us a chance to watch him learn those values the hard way.
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