#77: TONY

 

STARRING: Dominic Sessa, Emilia Jones, Dagmara Dominczyk, Rich Sommer, Stavros Halkias, Leo Woodall and Antonio Banderas. Written by Matt Johnson, Matthew Mller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe. Directed by Matt Johnson. Running time 106 minutes. 

It's 1975 and Jaws is playing in a double bill with the classic Charles Bronson movie, Violent City, while staggeringly creepy 19-year old Vassar College student, Anthony 'Tony' Bourdain (Dominic Sessa)lies to everyone he meets, knows or has even the merest of interactions with that he's a budding writer and winner of a writing scholarship, even his family. Latching on with all the focus of a laser guided missile, Tony fixates on fellow student Nancy Putkoski (Emilia Jones) and follows her to Provincetown in Massachusetts, for the summer, after stealing a couple of hundred dollars from his doting father. Once in Provincetown, Tone gets pissed, runs up a debt in a lobster restaurant called the Flagship, loses all his money, gets beaten up and knocked unconscious. In the morning he wakes up in a hammock on the back porch of the kindly owner of the Flagship (Antonio Banderas) and blags himself a job as a dishwasher where he slowly befriends the gang of psychopaths and maniacs who work in the kitchen. Every morning the unnamed Flagship owner throws a bucket of water over Tony, who then spends the day, smoking, taking drugs and flirting with Nancy. All the while Tone pretends to be a writer while not writing anything while secretly observing the practices of the kitchen. Finally he convinces the owner to open a special Friday night dinner service and serve lobster thermidor to impress Nancy, so he can shag her, and ends up burning down the restaurant. Which naturally upsets Antonio who tells Tone he was going to offer him a full time job. To repay the kindly old man, Tone and his junkie friend break into Antonio's house, steal a cooking book and stage a clam bake BBQ on the beach pretending to raise money to rebuild the Flagship. Happily the two young men collect a huge amount of money for 'charity' when Antonio arrives and Tone decides to make amends for being an absolute shitberg for the previous 100 minutes and sods off to culinary school in New York, but only after reuniting with his family so they can forgive him for stealing and running away. Before a series of captions tell us that the real life Anthony Bourdain went on to write a book about kitchens and travel the world. 

And that's it plot wise.

This is a tonally weird film about a miserable, self-obsessed teenage arsehole who thinks the fucking world owes him a living. Convinced of his own greatness and happy to roll over anyone he chooses and to lie, steal and cheat to get what he wants, the young Bourdain is a thoroughly unlikable little shit played horribly by Dominic Sessa who makes Bourdain appear to be a serial killer in training. He spends the whole film looking dirty, unkempt and disgusting, he's a boy who never bathes or brushes his teeth. All he does is stalk Nancy and try and groom her into having sex with him. He spends every second he is with her staring at her as if she's a piece of meat he's about to fillet. Every moment Sessa takes the stage you find yourself subconsciously scratching and fantasying about having a wash once the film is over. 

At no point does Bourdain become even remotely likeable and his grubby, greedy, self-obsessed narcissism becomes quite exhausting. The film presents him as a loner, a rebel destined for greatness but Sessa who spends the film slumped over like a hunchback and peering through greasy curly bangs is so unlikeable there's never any chance you'll buy into his self-obsessed bullshit. 

As an award-winning TV chef, I love a film about cooking but it seems the only nation capable of creating fantastic films about cooking are the French. For comparison, the French gave us the exquisite fare like The Taste of Things, about a banquet of fine wine and food while the yanks gave us Chef, about a food van selling cheese toasties. In fact the best movie America has ever given us about food was The Menu.

Because Sessa's Bourdain is so sleazy and unlikeable you spend the film wanting the foppish haired twat to fail, you're practically egging him on to so so in spectacular fashion, however, when the fail finally arrives late in the third act, it's handled with all the finese of a dine and dash. It's clumsy and implausible, he apparently doesn't realise that throwing buckets of water over an oil fire isn't a good idea and only succeeds in setting fire to the restaurant. Thank fuck then for Antonio who at least offers a subtle masterclass in less is more acting, but that's really about all I've got to praise it. 

It looks okay, some of the scenery is nice but that's all it really has going for it. I think a film following Bourdain after he leaves culinary school for his journey round the world would have been more interesting. Not so this, which arrives with all the pomp and ceremony of a disappointing desert.

6/10