August has spent itself on sequels and action movies, all of them doing their best to squeeze out one last push before September clears the runway for TIFF and the parade of award contenders. Tony has arrived, unbothered by any of that, and it turned out to be the best kind of palette cleanser.
Directed by Matt Johnson (Blackberry), Tony is drawn from the early chapters of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Dominic Sessa plays a nineteen-year-old Bourdain who loses the summer writing fellowship at Vassar he had already been bragging about, then follows a girl he is not quite cool enough for to Provincetown for the summer. He lies his way into a dishwashing job at a hole in the wall, and ends up sleeping in a hammock on the porch of the chef who will eventually become his mentor. The mentor is played by the formidable Antonio Banderas.
Sessa carries the whole thing in his body before he says a word. That Adam’s apple, and those lanky legs he has not quite grown into. You can see young Bourdain in the posture alone, all bravado stacked on top of a kid who does not yet know what to do with his own height. Banderas is doing something different and really, he makes the film for me. His chef comes with a set of quirky Catholic habits and a real obsession with food, living out of a modest little cottage, and the film peels his story back like the layers of an onion, a little more revealed each time Tony thinks he has him figured out.
What makes Tony work is that it never lets Bourdain off the hook for being a lot. He is too big for his britches and not nearly as together as he wants people to think, and the film fills in that gap without rushing to close it. He cannot admit he lost the fellowship. He cannot admit he followed a girl across state lines to chase a crush. So he lies, badly and often, and lies his way into a kitchen, a relationship, and eventually the career that made his name.
There is something underneath it, too, about what it used to take to belong. This is the 70s: collect calls and cash, no debit cards, no group chats. Parties happen because someone mentions one in passing, not because a device tells you where to be. Bell bottoms, bonfires on the beach, jumping off piers. Nobody is hiding behind a screen, which means Bourdain has to have actual nerve to talk his way into this small, tight community. No text to send if he chickens out.
It is a film about a kid on the brink of becoming someone, set in that specific, electric stretch of late August when summer has not quite let go and school has not quite started. Which makes it the ideal watch for exactly this week.