I saw Matt Johnson’s Tony recently. It is supposed to be about the young Anthony Bourdain, and specifically, his first year working in a restaurant kitchen in 1970’s Provincetown, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The older chef who kicks his butt and mentors him is played by Antonio Banderas, so you know he has to be a Good Guy At Heart. That’s what you cast Banderas for. The chef who actually kicked Bourdain’s butt was an omni-competent, all-knowing, slave-driving, underpaying, and probably over-exaggerated in the telling, monster called Bigfoot. Who appeared in Bourdain’s life after he had gone through the Culinary Institute of America (yep, the CIA) and done another year in P-town.
Dominic Sessa was cast as Bourdain. What you need to know about Bourdain is that he was 6’4”, skinny and had a malice-free mischievousness in his face. Being 6’4” for a man is like having a nice smile and 36D’s for a woman: the world is going to cut you a lot of slack. Sessa is not 6’4” - he’s about the same height as Banderas - and so we do not feel the sheer presence Bourdain would have exerted.
Next problem. Bourdain was a Boomer, and Matt Johnson has Sessa play him like a Gen Z, because that’s going to be the audience and Sessa was born slap in the middle of Gen Z. And this was when I realised why films made about twenty or so years ago feel very different to the current crop. They don’t have Gen Z’s, and precious few Millennials (the oldest of whom would have been 25 in 2006). They have real people who grew up before the Internet, and have only ever used the word `problematic’ with irony quotes. Films today, even nice little art movies, are made for Gen Z and later Millennials, who are a bunch of prissy nebbishes, who will never, let’s face it, be able to afford a two-star dinner. It’s as if the writers pulled the punches so as not to shock the fragile souls of their young audience.
Bourdain was a self-confessed Chaos Monkey and professional Asshole of a Manager. Read his best-selling Kitchen Confidential (I re-read it after the movie) and it is clear that: a) he loved food from an early age, partly because it could be used to shock (aka `gross out’) regular people, b) he was consciously dedicated and put the work in to become a professional line chef, in the same way that young men and women put in the work to compete in the Leeds Piano Competition at age 20 (the youngest allowable in 2027); c) he was prepared to live the life. None of that comes through in the film, possibly because it is utterly antithetical to the attitudes of Gen Z, and we would not want to alienate the audience, would we?
There isn’t one moment when Sessa’s Bourdain was seen to actively enjoy the food. We have no idea at all why at the end of the movie he is seen interviewing for the CIA (insert CIA joke here).
Leo Woodall’s ‘Sal’ is far closer to the spirit of the original than Sessa. I’d call his performance relaxed and seemingly spontaneous, but that might not do justice to the amount of work he put into creating that character.
There have been other Chef Movies. Jon Favreau’s 2014 Chef, John Wells’ 2015 Burnt, Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci’s 1996 Big Night, and Bob Giraldi’s definitive 2000 Dinner Rush. Bradley Cooper starred as `Jack Bourdain’ in a 2005-6 TV series that ended too quickly. I may try to find that.
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