The callow youth of Anthony Bourdain

  In the summer of 1975, a callow 19-year-old from New Jersey traveled to Provincetown, Mass., a certified mecca of free-style living. Tony (later to become celebrity chef and TV star Anthony Bourdain) spent the summer working in restaurants and partying. 

 At the time, Bourdain was dealing with rejection for a writing fellowship at Vassar, the college he attended. But that didn't stop him from claiming to be a writer to anyone who’d listen. 

 Bourdain assayed this early part of his life in Kitchen Confidential (2000), a bestseller that helped boost his public profile and establish his reputation as a bad boy of culinary arts. 

  In the movie, Tony, a renegade young Bourdain  (Dominic Sessa) follows a girl (Emilia Jones) he has fallen for to Provincetown. Once there, he lands a restaurant job and sleeps on a hammock on the porch of the Portuguese restaurateur (Antonio Banderas) who will become his mentor.

  So goes the movie-altered version of this fledgling period of Bourdain's life. Johnson turns Tony into a coming-of-age story in which a young man learns to accept the use of the more formal  “Anthony,” a decision that's emblematic of his emerging seriousness about food.

   The movie opens with a telling quote from Kitchen Confidential in which the mature Anthony looks back at his young self: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” 

    We don't spend much time wondering whether this knockabout kid will ruin his life. We know Tony's arrogance will make way for the man who became a worthy guide through the world of food — no matter how exotic the fare. Bourdain's travelogue and food expeditions also yielded one of the best-written shows on television.

     In that sense, Johnson’s movie can't help being a bit of a cheat. We know the immature jerk of Tony will mature. We also know that Tony's pretensions about being a writer eventually became real; as a writer, he matched a broad range of interests with keen powers of observation. He didn't have to pretend to be smart; he was smart.

     Filled with drinking, drugs, and carousing, Tony's youthful summer is set against the noisy mayhem of a kitchen backdrop. Tony makes novice mistakes but eventually gains some footing. He discovers that he could feel at home in a kitchen, a feeling I'd liken to what some of us felt about the newsrooms where we learned to be reporters, places where we thought we could belong.

     A small cast of kitchen characters includes Sal (Leo Woodall), a womanizing, cocaine-snorting oyster shucker and prep cook who wears his callousness with a confidence Tony can't match. 

    Johnson’s story includes an incident in which the restaurant suffers a major calamity. Other scenes depict Tony's wobbly relationship with Jones’ Nancy. She's the woman who eventually would become Bourdain's first wife. 

    Credit Banderas with a weary and wise performance as a chef who's so religious he makes Tony accompany him to church on Sunday. Banderas's character presides over a band of young rogues but he respects the disciplined ways of the kitchen. He may not be a the top of his game, but he knows where the peaks are.

    Tony stands as a decent preview of a life that was destined to become more interesting after the movie’s redemptive conclusion. The adult Bourdain was better company than his 19-year-old self -- and more interesting, as well.

     Bourdain committed suicide in June of 2018. He was 61. Johnson minimizes suggestions about the tragic end awaiting the cocky kid who Sessa brings to life. He sticks to the world Bourdain inhabited before his life began to take shape.

      Some of the dramatic license Johnson takes bothered me, but I went along for the ride. I appreciated the movie’s willingness to spice up the coming-of-age formula. I also realized that in this post-Bear era, I could still appreciate a foray into the bustling world of a professional kitchen, even in a tourist trap of a restaurant that was a long way from Brasserie Les Halles, the now gone New York eatery where Bourdain became executive chef.

     Nineteen-year-old Tony probably would have had to borrow a few bucks to purchase even a moderately priced appetizer at Brasserie Les Halles. Tony's mix of comedy and colorful incidents will do until someone makes a movie about the grown-up who fascinated us with his adventurous spirit and knowledge. That might make for a more memorable movie.

      

      

The life and times of Anthony Bourdain

 

     God, I miss that guy. 

     Odd thing to say about someone I never met, but that's how I feel about Anthony Bourdain, the TV personality who traveled the world. Bourdain ate and drank in numerous settings -- and he did it with acuity and generosity.

    Like just about every other fan of Bourdain's CNN Parts Unknown, I was shocked to learn that Bourdain had committed suicide. In June of 2018, he hanged himself in a hotel room in an Alsatian town in northeastern France.

   It was impossible to believe that a man who seemed so engaged with the world would voluntarily leave it.

    I suppose everyone who watches Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain will be looking for clues about why he chose to end an amazing life in which he was, roughly in this order, a kitchen scrub, a chef, a heroin addict, a husband, a father, a lover,  and a celebrity.

   Director Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom and Won't You Be My Neighbor?) doesn't exactly answer the big question as he chronicles Bourdain's life. Bourdain was one of those rare people who didn't perform on TV: He lived on it.

   The closest we come to understanding Bourdain's death comes toward the end of the movie when Neville deals with Bourdain's relationship with actress Asia Argento, his involvement with the #MeToo movement, and the tangles of an affair gone sour.  

    An engrossing look at an extraordinary life, Roadrunner does a fine job showing how Bourdain's career unfolded -- not according to some planned trajectory but as something that seemed to happen to him as he became chef at Manhattan's Les Halles. His life changed when he forayed  into authorship with Kitchen Confidential, a compulsively readable insider's view of restaurant life.

    Before Parts Unknown, Bourdain had two other TV shows -- A Cook's Tour and No Reservations. He became the guy who'd try anything. To underscore the point, Neville shows us Bourdain in Vietnam where he ate the heart of cobra, telling us that he could still feel it beating as he swallowed.

    Bourdain did a lot of crazy things but avoided turning them into self-aggrandizing stunts. Adventure eating became a form of cultural sharing, a commitment to bonding with the people with whom he mingled. He wasn't just tasting food; he was tasting the world -- with a camera crew to record his observations, often delivered in beautifully written narrations.

    Neville tells about Bourdain's marriages and we learn that domesticity couldn’t survive a travel schedule that would have destroyed most of us. Bourdain realized that he had bypassed normality. 

    All of this is tempered by appearances from people who knew Bourdain. Celebrity chefs Eric Ripert -- who discovered Bourdain's dead body -- and David Chang and other pals. We also hear from former wife Ottavia Busia-Bourdain and, importantly, from the producers and crew members who worked with him.

    So, no, there's no Rosebud moment in Roadrunner and we and Bourdain's legacy probably are better for the lack of it. Maybe that's the only gift Bourdain's terrible departure gave us. 

   We'll never really know why he ended his life, and that allows Roadrunner to leave us with an enticing plate of leftovers; i.e., plenty to think about: food, culture, celebrity, and what it’s like to ride a wave that never seems to break or settle on any shore.

Where I’ve been lately -- and some sadness

Yes, I’ve fallen behind. As a result of recent travels, I've been unable to keep this running collection of movie reviews up-to-date.

I’ll pick up again this week, but before I do, I want to say something about Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef, author and TV star who committed suicide in France last week.

I was sitting on a bed in a hotel in Montevecchia, Italy — on the fringes of Italy’s insanely scenic Lake District — when a headline flashed across my tablet. Bourdain had died at the age of 61.

As an occasional watcher of Bourdain’s CNN show, Parts Unknown, I found myself in step with just about everyone else who thought that a Bourdain suicide was inconceivable. Not the robust, I’ll-eat-anything world traveler who drank and ate his way across the globe, sometimes visiting places few of us voluntarily would venture. On a recent show, Bourdain proclaimed Glasgow, by no means the most exotic of his many destinations, as one of his favorite cities. He didn’t convince me, but the guy earned points for going against the grain.

In a foodie culture in which restaurants have become exalted Meccas of culinary worship, Bourdain seemed like a guy with his feet firmly planted on the ground, someone who held little truck with places that serve meticulously assembled, nibble-sized portions on oversized plates, high-priced oases of pleasure on otherwise arid dinnerware deserts. There was more than a hint of the working man about him.

Better yet, Bourdain seemed as if he’d be fun to hang out with, something to which those who knew him attested in various startled post-death reflections on his life as America’s explorer-in-chief. My liking of Bourdain also may have had parochial roots; he grew up in Leonia, New Jersey, not far from the northern Jersey town where I was raised. Another Jersey boy. I knew the accent.

I have no idea what demons haunted Bourdain, but I wondered whether those demons were encouraged to flap their serrated wings by too much air travel, too many unfamiliar hotel beds, too many ports-of-call, and too much cultural bombardment. Bourdain said he liked to move, and he seemed to have turned his life into a form of cross-cultural aerobics.

Cliche has it that travel broadens one’s horizons, which — of course - is true. But it also can kick the shit out of you, challenging your body clock with time shifts that sometimes require merciful assistance from pharmaceutical sleeping aids.

Of course, Bourdain and his crew made it all look easy. There he was walking the streets of this or that city, tapping the wisdom of top local experts or long-standing friends, sharing drinks and meals. He so frequently pronounced these meals as “delicious” that I wondered whether the guy ever ate anything he didn’t enjoy.

He did. In interviews, Bourdain talked about being a guest in various cultures and how he learned to respect those cultures by sharing local cuisines, always without queasy judgment or moral censure. He once even ate — begin grimacing now — unwashed warthog anus.

I’m all for experiencing cultural diversity and I’d like to think of myself as fairly open to new experiences, but if someone offered me unwashed warthog anus I’d politely refuse and ask whether they might be able to dig up some chips instead.

I wondered, too, whether all the travel and adventurous eating had taken the place of the rush that Bourdain once got from heroin, part of a young man's foray into a world of drugs that he openly discussed.

But I’m no psychologist and I won't play one here.

All I’ll say is that Bourdain’s suicide serves as a powerful reminder that what we see on TV should be taken cum grano salis; i.e., with a large grain of salt that Bourdain probably would have encouraged us to enjoy without guilt.

In the end, Bourdain reminded us of an important truth: We do not know the people who turn up on screens in our living rooms any more than we should presume to know or understand those who turn up on bigger screens at the movies.

There’s only one way really to get to know someone; that’s eye-ball-to-eye-ball over time -- and even that isn't always enough.

I’m going to miss the Bourdain I saw on TV, but when I watch reruns of his program, I’ll know that I’m not seeing the whole person. We never do.

Like you, I’m not the same person at 2 p.m. on a sunny afternoon as I am on those occasions (fortunately infrequent) when I awaken at 4 a.m. abandoned by sleep as my mind restlessly stumbles through thickets of anxiety or regret, things unsaid or undone.

I’m saddened that Bourdain has so abruptly vanished from the public scene; I’m also saddened by the thought that Bourdain, a man who could accept all manner of challenge and diversity, might finally have faced one he couldn’t fully accommodate: himself.

The story of an enigmatic chef

It seems almost quaint to remember the days before committed foodies became commonplace and chefs emerged as celebrities. Director Lydia Tenaglia's documentary Jeremiah Tower, The Last Magnificent reminds us that the current obsession with restaurants and their chefs had a beginning. Regarded by some as the first celebrity chef, Tower worked with Alice Waters at Berkeley's famed Chez Panisse. He later opened a San Francisco restaurant called Stars. Tower grew up around wealth but was mostly ignored by his patrician parents. Even as a kid, he was obsessed with food and menus. After Harvard, he applied for a job at Waters' Chez Panisse with no prior experience. At the time, Chez Panisse was a kind of hippy hang-out with great food. Did Tower -- an enigmatic but charismatic gay man -- do more to establish Chez Panisse's culinary importance than anyone else? Before his break with Waters, Towers shifted the restaurant's cuisine to locally grown ingredients and was instrumental in creating the so-called "California Cuisine" -- at least that's the impression I took from the film. After an earthquake ravaged Stars, Tower withdrew to Mexico, where he resided until he made an improbable attempt at a comeback. In 2014, he took over Tavern on the Green, a heavily trafficked New York City restaurant that couldn't accommodate Towers' idiosyncratic but entirely committed approach. I could have done without Tenaglia's attempts at recreating scenes from Tower's boyhood, but watching various big names in food -- Martha Stewart, Wolfgang Puck, Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain -- talk about Towers' career proves fascinating and Tower himself adds an elusive but compelling quality. The film's best achievement may be the way it reminds us that restaurants have become entertainments unto themselves; Tenaglia shows us the life -- and trendy commercial heat -- that the best of them generate. Waters, by the way, isn't among those interviewed.

A comic look at the road to ruin

Terrific performances, biting wit and insight make The Big Short one of the year's best movies.

The weird thing about The Big Short is this: At some point you realize (as do some of the movie's characters) that you're rooting for a group of guys to make a financial killing, but you also know that their success means the whole economy will tank.

So watching the movie leaves you feeling elated, dejected and angry in quick succession, which, I presume, is precisely what director Adam McKay intended when he adapted Michael Lewis' book about the devastations caused by the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market.

I've read criticisms of McKay's movie that focused on the fact that it's entertaining without being infuriating enough.

Maybe so, but I think McKay's effort has a different value: It focuses on the insanity that drove the mortgage market prior to 2008 when the bottom fell out. When confronted with this kind of damaging absurdity, we're tempted to think that two choices manifest: We either laugh or sink into the deepest of funks.

But McKay and a very able cast offer a third alternative: We do both -- and we applaud the efforts of a filmmaker who rips the mask off a brand of stupidity and greed that may not entirely have disappeared just because the economy has improved.

Now, the chances are pretty good that a whole lot of people don't really understand what happened with sub-prime mortgages. If someone asked you to define a CDO (collateralized debt obligation) could you do it? Same goes for a credit default swap.

Charles Randolph's screenplay goes a long way toward explaining such financial instruments, sometimes interrupting the movie's narrative flow with brief lectures from celebrities such as Margot Robbie, seen in a bathtub speaking directly to the camera. Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez also chime in.

At first, you wonder what the hell these people are doing in the movie, but you quickly realize that McKay has decided to make the necessary explanations as diverting as possible before returning to a story that's driven by terrific performances.

The tone is set early when Ryan Gosling appears as a Deutsche Bank hotshot who intermittently serves as our cynical guide through the story.

Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, a former MD who wears T-shirts and shorts at work, walks around his office barefoot and sometimes sits at desk beating a pair of drumsticks against his thighs. Burry's the genius who actually peeked inside the packaging and re-packaging of mortgage-backed securities and realized that they were built on air.

Given enough time, Burry knew the whole structure would collapse, which prompted him to set about inventing a mechanism to bet against a mortgage market that most regarded as rock solid.

Then there's Mark Baum (Steve Carell) a New York hedge fund manager with a conscience. When Gosling's Jared Venentt insists that it's time to bet against mortgages, Baum voices skepticism. So does his team.

Baum seems to combine two traits that can make life difficult for an ambitious investor: He wants to make money, and he also wants to view himself as an ethical player.

When Baum and his team tour Florida's devastated luxury housing market, they hardly can believe the mortgage bankers they encounter, guys who are more likely to sprout wings than develop anything resembling a conscience.

At a conference in Las Vegas, Baum meets with another wheeler-dealer. Again, he can't believe what he's hearing from a supposed maven. It may be a rationalization on Baum's part, but he convinces himself that these smug idiots deserve a comeuppance. He's more certain than ever that it's time to sell short.

But in what may be his best performance yet, Carell makes it clear that Baum won't be laughing all the way to the bank. He's genuinely worried about the pain the economy will suffer.

Those familiar with Lewis' book quickly will note that McKay has made alterations. But the gist is the same: For a time (and who knows if that time truly has ended) the economy was based on fraud, greed and a near-total disconnect from reality.

The economy became paper, and, in the end, wasn't worth what it was printed on.

And then there's Brad Pitt. Pitt has a very nice turn as Ben Rickert, a guy who made a fortune, turned his back on Wall Street and retired to Boulder.

A couple of newbies (Finn Wittrock and John Magaro) discover that they'd be smart to bet against all the phony/baloney mortgages. They convince the reclusive Rickert to help them move from the kids' table to the one where the high rollers sit.

Pitt's Rickert believes this duo, which sometimes provides straight-ahead comic relief, but he also tries to educate them: If they win, the world loses.

And, yes, before it's done, The Big Short reminds us that ordinary people suffered because of what the big boys did.

So don't bet against The Big Short. It's an exuberant, smart and pointed reminder that much of what we believe about the economy takes place in a world of smoke and mirrors.

When the smoke clears and the mirrors break, it's people like us who are left wondering what wrong. The Big Short wants us to know.