David Fincher’s “The Social Network” begins with Mark Zuckerberg’s fictional girlfriend, Erica, calling him an asshole to his face. A lot of people love that scene because Mark Zuckerberg could be considered, by any rational measure, a huge asshole, so the movie seems to have its heart in the right place. At least until the final scene. It’s often overlooked, but “The Social Network” literally ends with a lawyer telling Zuckerberg, to his face, that he’s not an asshole — he’s just “trying so hard to be.”
I’ve always felt that for all the mostly deserved credit “The Social Network” gets, it doesn’t stick the landing. Making a movie about an asshole is a risky business because if your main character is an asshole, why should anyone care about them? You can admit he’s unlikable all you want, but apparently the filmmakers think he is cool enough to hang out with anyway. “The Social Network” arguably gets away with this contradiction (if you say so) but in some ways I respect Matt Johnson’s biopic of Anthony Bourdain more. “Tony” knows how to really make us care about an asshole, or at least how to convince us put up with him for a couple hours.
“Tony” opens with a quote from Bourdain’s autobiography, “Kitchen Confidential,” which reads as follows: “I was – to be frank – a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” It’s one of the finest epigraphs I’ve ever seen in a motion picture. It takes the curse off the entire movie, assuring us that even though we are about to spend time with an asshole, the movie isn’t on his side. The young Anthony Bourdain in “Tony” is not sympathetic. Not until he gets his ass kicked, one way or another.
So “Tony” proceeds to kick Anthony Bourdain’s ass. Dominic Sessa (“The Holdovers”) plays the future celebrity chef as a smarmy 19-year-old know-it-all in the 1970s who thinks he can coast to literary stardom because he’s a genius. He’s not a genius, he just knows how to sound like one. His pitch to the English department at Vassar, for a summer program which would pay him to sit around and write a novel, is the kind of B.S. a smart kid pulls out of his butt at the last minute because he’s never had to try very hard. Bourdain tells his family it’s a done deal, but his greatness isn’t validated. He’s rejected from the program and instead of coming clean he steals money from his father’s wallet and flits off to Cape Cod, just to follow a cute girl he knew in high school.
Of course he gets there with big dreams of scooping Nancy (Emilia Jones) off her feet, but he immediately finds out she has a boyfriend, so he does what all not-actually-great men would do: He gets drunk, sexually harasses a waitress, gets thrown out of the restaurant and gets robbed. The restaurant’s owner, known to everyone as Chef (Antonio Banderas), takes pity on Bourdain and lets him sleep on his hammock. He even gives Bourdain a summer job washing dishes because he’s totally broke. Even when cocky jerks fail, they fail slightly upwards. Nobody asks the recently harassed waitress how she feels about having to work with him. This isn’t that kind of movie or, sadly, that kind of world.
Bourdain claims he knows his way around a kitchen and Chef believes him, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. His co-worker, Sal (Leo Woodall), is a lout who snorts cocaine and shucks oysters for a living. When Sal invites himself along to Nancy’s party, he scores with the ladies but Bourdain does not; because Sal has real confidence and Bourdain just has bravado. Bourdain can’t back up his lofty lies. When Sal says he can shuck an oyster at least he can shuck an oyster, which is more respectable and — especially when Leo Woodall does it — weirdly seductive.
“Tony” is the story of the single, formative summer in Anthony Bourdain’s life where he learned that he knows nothing. It’s the sort of Socratic wisdom he could have been learning in college. Instead, he gets it in the smelly kitchen of a seafood restaurant in Cape Cod, waking up every morning to a bucket of sea water in his face. It looks like he’s bonding with Chef, played by Banderas as a wise old salt with a weakness for sentiment, but he still thinks he’s better than his would-be mentor. After all, Bourdain has Vassar and Chef makes lobster rolls in a tourist trap.
Matt Johnson’s previous movie, “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” was a brilliant daredevil indie sci-fi buddy comedy. It was also about assholes but they had good hearts and they earned our love. “Tony” never makes young Bourdain entirely likable. Even when he does the right thing he tries to do it for the wrong reasons. This isn’t a superhero origin story where he changes and becomes a do-gooder at the end. This is an origin story about Bourdain’s inciting incident, the exact moment in his life where he realized he needed to change. In Matt Johnson’s hands that’s epic enough for a whole film.
The masterful tone and excellent performances from Sessa, Woodall and Banderas overshadow the film’s actresses, all of whom Johnson lets down in one way or another. This is not a cinematic misdemeanor. It traps “Tony” within a macho miasma, even in its most sensitive moments, and it denies the film, its audience and Bourdain’s character some much-needed outside perspective on his bullcrap.
By the time the credits roll “Tony” has long since receded in a formula. The big finale feels contrived and a little unconvincing. I guess the filmmakers thought subverting the tone of a biopic was enough, so Johnson throws Bourdain’s fan base a bone. It just doesn’t have any meat on it. “Tony” may have its heart in the right place but this movie still has an ego, and Johnson can’t resist leaving the crowd conventionally please, complete with a weirdly unearned riff on the last few seconds of “Iron Man.”
But “Tony” does earn our affection, mostly because it never pretends Bourdain has earned our affection. We are invited to view the genius as a work in progress. Bourdain’s rough draft stinks. The film about this rough draft is polished and interesting, but another round of notes wouldn’t have killed it. We’re watching a guy who will one day reach his full potential, in a movie that doesn’t entirely reach its own.
