There are many stretches from Anthony Bourdain’s “gritty” and “well-chronicled” life that could work for a biopic, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. But in “Tony”, Matt Johnson sticks with “just one summer” in 1975, when the celebrity chef was 19 – long before he found fame and fortune.
Based on the opening chapters of Bourdain’s bestselling memoir, “Kitchen Confidential”, the film opens as Tony – Dominic Sessa, the “deeply talented” young actor from “The Holdovers” – leaves home after failing to get a prestigious summer writing fellowship. He follows the “girl he fancies”, Nancy, to Cape Cod and gets “self-pityingly drunk” when he finds out she has a boyfriend.
After being thrown out of an oyster shack, a kindly chef (Antonio Banderas) gives him a job washing dishes and Tony finds himself in the “cramped, all-male milieu of flying expletives and cruel practical jokes”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
Johnson effortlessly mixes the “toxic camaraderie” of these scenes with montages of Bourdain’s slow-but-steady daily improvements. “It plays like ‘Rocky’ with kitchen knives”.
Gradually, Tony’s “insufferability” is “hosed away”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times, and Sessa dazzles in the “contradictory” role of the “charismatic sad-sack”. Johnson has made a “funny, sun-kissed biopic” that is “spry” and “enjoyable” despite the “complicated brief”. “Tony” is aimed at those who know that the chef’s life story will lead to both “glory and tragedy” (Bourdain died by suicide in 2018). The film “isn’t the whole story”. But that’s “probably fitting” – the chef was “nothing if not a spinner of yarns”.
I found it a bit “strange”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “Tony” is an “entertaining” watch but the “feelgood trajectory is compromised by what we know” about Bourdain’s troubled life and death. A scene in which Banderas tells Tony about a chef to Louis XIV who “killed himself in shame when the key ingredients didn’t arrive for a banquet” is “presumably there tacitly to acknowledge Bourdain’s heartbreaking fate. It sits oddly.”
Mostly, though, it’s a “rollicking, surprisingly sunny coming-of-age tale”, said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in The Times. “Picture ‘The Bear’ with less angst and more innocence.” Johnson manages to capture the “blistering, sizzling energy” of Bourdain’s memoir and Leo Woodall is “succulently charismatic” as Tony’s “cocksure, coke-snorting” co-worker, Sal.
But the real star is Sessa who “nails Bourdain’s annoying young Turk braggadocio” while giving us a peek at the “unformed vulnerability beneath”. In all, it’s a portrait of the fiery young chef that’s “spicy, salty, and just sweet enough. I’d happily have second helpings.”
