Big Screen Views: “Tony”
A summer in the kitchen, a baptism on the beach.
Mary, Mother of God, is rolling her eyes heavenward. It seems she’s reacting to the behavior of one young man who’s paying her a visit in a Provincetown, Massachusetts, church.
This would be 19-year-old Tony, the title jerk on his hero’s journey through one fiery summer. The film “Tony” is about Anthony Bourdain, about learning stuff the hard way, having mentors evil and good, and about why we need clambakes.
Dominic Sessa, the 23-year-old actor we first met in “The Holdovers” (2023), doesn’t look much like Bourdain, but his sullen portrayal is peerless. Both Sessa and his character are enormously blessed to have beside them a man simply called Chef (Antonio Banderas), the embodiment of mercy and morality. Those qualities stand in high relief as Chef schools Tony in the kitchen of The Flagship, his seafood joint with a motley crew of cooks.
This movie plunges us into 1975, and douses us in summer sun and saltwater. “Jaws” is playing at the drive-in. Girls wear halter tops and short shorts to nightly parties. Our boy Tony is a student at Vassar who lusts after Nancy (Emilia Jones) to the point that he follows her out to Cape Cod. He promptly makes an ass of himself at a bar, gets beaten up and has himself stripped of the cash he stole from his parents back in New Jersey. It’s a stroke of luck that Chef, the Portuguese Catholic who brings Tony to the aforementioned church, gives him a job.
Tony is no cook, but he is a creative thinker and a shameless liar. His head and spine curve forward, all the better to gaze at his navel. To impress Nancy, he makes up a tale about winning a writing fellowship; then he has to make up a modified cover story when she finds him working in the Flagship kitchen.
In counterpoint to Chef’s good influence, there’s Sal (Leo Woodall). He’s Tony’s co-worker, and filled with anger and horrific habits. Tony is being shown a couple of possible lives: You can learn a trade and treat people with dignity, as Chef does, or you can tumble down Sal’s path. This summer has a way of compressing Tony’s education, and his long days in the kitchen lead to a baptism by fire.
“Tony” is a mix of fiction and fact. It’s a portrayal, with a big helping of dramatic license, of a man who learns how and why to be honest with others and with himself. If you want a piece with less fiction, read Bourdain’s memoir, “Kitchen Confidential,” from 2000, or watch Morgan Neville’s documentary, “Roadunner.” That 2021 film follows Bourdain’s odyssey from chef to global phenomenon. It explores the life that ended by suicide in 2018.
But let us return to “Tony’s” clambake. This all-ages, all-comers feast on the beach is a glorious symbol, in the movie and in real life. We can only hope “Tony” inspires more clambakes, in fond memory of the great Anthony Bourdain himself.
