Anthony Bourdain Biopic ‘Tony’ Is a Kitchen Con

Familiarity and comfort are why people will pay to see Matt Johnson’s “Tony” in cinemas this weekend. Because almost everyone knew the late Anthony Bourdain, the handsome ex-celebrity chef and host of the Travel Channel’s No Reservations and CNN’s Parts Unknown, the film, set in Provincetown in the summer of 1979, will seem from a distance like an agreeable hang with an old friend.It’s basically about how a young, insecure, and decidedly pretentious Bourdain (Dominic Sassa) fell in love with being a chef under the tutelage of a Brazilian restaurant owner Ciro (Antonio Banderas) while trying to win the heart of temporary waitress Nancy (Emilia Jones).The good news is that Mr. Johnson’s movie, based on a chapter from Bourdain’s quarter-century-old “Kitchen Confidential,” is decently made in a light-hearted, “Hot Fun in the Summertime” sense — a sometimes raucously atmospheric return to the Jimmy Carter era suffused with young blood, romantic longing, booze and drugs, sandy beaches, and a reliably briney aroma.The unfortunate news is that Mr. Sassa, an edgy, fetching presence in Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers,” isn’t playing the charismatic, gentle-eyed Comme Ci, Comme Ça Bourdain of legend. In the the screenplay, by Mr. Johnson, Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, he’s been written as an obnoxious, entitled malcontent — a scowling, unlikable liar who tells Nancy he’s a novelist-in-progress who’s subsisting on a university grant. Mr. Sassa, pleasant enough in “The Holdovers,” not only resembles, but seems to have been possessed by the spirit of Richard Ramirez, the American serial killer from the mid-1980s. He has the feral eyes, I regret to observe, of an irate sociopath. As you watch “Tony,” you could be forgiven for asking yourself: “What is this? I thought I’d be hanging with an immature but winning version of a cool foodie dude I used to watch on the tube but I’m stuck with a foul-mannered, slow-on-the-pickup dimwit who can’t open clam shells without cutting himself and who totally fumbles the seduction game with Nancy.”“Tony” finally takes off around the 75-minute mark with a spirited Lobster Newburgh sequence, but then it slides back into a lost-jerk mood. I lost all respect for Sassa when he’s finally about to go all the way with Nancy but then blows it big-time by suddenly confessing the truth about his situation (no grant, not a writer, kitchen worker). Every red-blooded hetero guy in the world would shout out to Mr. Sassa’s Bourdain: “Dude, you don’t spill the confessional beans before doing the deed — you spill them after the fact.” Mr. Johnson has mistitled this film. He should have called it “Dumb Lying Hostile Idiot.”Before you think that my hatred for Mr. Sassa is so intense that I may be projecting, that I may have seen my younger, oafish self in him, well maybe. But there’s a basic strategy to “selling” a flawed character to an audience. Take two Al Pacino films. In 1975’s “Dog Day Afternoon” Mr. Pacino’s Sonny is a bumbling bank robber but he’s nonetheless charming in a hapless-loser sort of way. He wins over the audience when he finds Carol Kane hiding under a desk and asks “What’s this, a squirrel?” In an early scene from 1989’s “Sea of Love,” Pacino’s lonely, alcoholic NYC detective shows decency and compassion by declining to arrest a felonious dad because he’s with his young son. From that point on the audience is putty in Pacino’s hands. Mr. Johnson and his co-writers not only fail to sell their young Bourdain with any sort of similar strategy — they seem to actually try to agitate and alienate viewers. Mr. Sassa is a sullen, self-deluding jerk from the get-go. I was silently muttering to Antonio Banderas’s character Ciro, “Please fire this worthless, slow-witted lunkhead.” I was also whispering to Ms. Jones’s Nancy, “Please reject this guy’s romantic overtures! …he’s not worth the trouble.”As the film is ending Johnson shows us a black-and-white snap of the real, chef-smocked, 19-year-old Bourdain with his Provincetown kitchen co-workers, and your immediately wish the film had been about this relaxed, good-looking guy rather than Dominic Sassa’s Richard Ramirez impersonation.A friend insists to me that Matt Johnson is on the brink of becoming a major filmmaker, and that plenty will disagree with me about the merits of this film. Maybe so, I answered, but I know how this film made me feel. I couldn’t get out of the theater fast enough.

Anthony Bourdain Biopic ‘Tony’ Is a Kitchen Con

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