Since I am the lead film critic here and a sometime professional food person, I probably should say something about Tony, which opened last week. The movie isn’t really about food that much, nor is it about the mental troubles that would eventually lead Anthony Bourdain to end his own life in 2018. If you’re looking for something that explains what the chef, author, and global celebrity was all about, that movie hasn’t yet been made. (The 2021 documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain was largely composed of interviews with his friends, who hadn’t yet processed his death.)
Tony tells you what it’s about in the quote that’s on the movie’s poster and on a title card at the film’s beginning. Bourdain describes his teenage self: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout and really in need of a good ass-kicking.” An overconfident young man learning how not to be a bastard probably should be the story of more movies than it is. I have seen better examples of the form than this, though the writing and acting make it well worth the ticket price.
Dominic Sessa plays 19-year-old Tony — “Only my mother calls me Anthony” — who is an English lit student at Vassar College with visions of spending the summer of 1975 in New York and becoming the next J.D. Salinger, only better. However, when his professors turn him down for a prestigious fellowship, he follows his high-school crush and fellow Vassar student Nancy (Emilia Jones) to the beach resort of Provincetown, Mass. In exchange for sleeping on the premises, he takes a job washing dishes at a seafood restaurant called The Flagship, run by a chef (Antonio Banderas) who’s so stern that none of the employees know his name or whether he’s Spanish, Portuguese, or Mexican.
If you’ve seen Sessa before, it was either as the private-school kid in The Holdovers or one of the outlaw magicians in Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. Weirdly enough, he’s made up here to look less like the teenage Bourdain than he does like this movie’s director/co-writer, Matt Johnson. Maybe Johnson sees something of what I hope he used to be in the boorish, entitled Tony, who thinks that his education level makes him hot stuff and lies to everyone around him that he won the fellowship and is now writing the next great American novel.
Sessa’s sharp features and piercing gaze make him a natural for a character who’s closed-off and angry at the world for failing to recognize his genius. Those qualities also come in handy in the scenes where Tony silently observes the workings of The Flagship’s kitchen, with the line cooks snorting coke, trading sexist jokes, and pouring cornstarch down their pants because the seaside humidity can be hell on one’s pubes. On his first day at work, Tony becomes a target of their hazing when he makes the mistake of picking up a cast-iron skillet from the stove with his bare hands.
This is the first American movie for the Canadian filmmaker Johnson, who previously made the admirable tech drama BlackBerry. I could use some more visual pizzazz from him, particularly in the presentation of the food, though he does come up with a well-turned montage of the chef waking Tony up at 10:45 every morning by splashing seawater in his face. The bigger issue might be Tony’s redemption coming too easily — we don’t necessarily need a big moment like him being punched in the face early on for drunkenly harassing The Flagship’s waitress (Monica Raymund). He comes clean with Nancy about the fellowship and costs himself the chance to have sex with her, which is nice, but I’m missing the sense of the light bulb going on for Tony that food is what he’s meant to devote his life to.
He does at least see the chef spending his days off boiling seawater for salt to fill the dining room’s salt shakers and stewing his own ketchup before pouring it into empty Heinz bottles. The customers will never notice these, but what was it that Thomas Carlyle said about genius and taking pains? Tony nudges the crusty chef into serving the French cuisine that he loves instead of lobster rolls and fish and chips, and later revives a bygone Provincetown tradition by holding a clambake on the beach. Seeing crowds of people turn out for food and company may not be enough to bring the movie’s story to a point, but it’s a nice way to mark the end of summer both on the screen and off.
Tony
Starring Dominic Sessa and Emilia Jones. Directed by Matt Johnson. Written by Matt Johnson, Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe. Rated R.
