Matt Johnson is not tight-lipped about his approach to filmmaking. Discussing his 2023 film on the creation of the revolutionary mobile device, “BlackBerry,” the director stated, “I can only speak for my own experience, I think that it’s all the same. I look at ‘BlackBerry,’ and I look at these guys, and I’m trying to extract the myth from it. I didn’t know anything about the BlackBerry. I didn’t even touch one before the movie. I’m not a technophile whatsoever.” The movie would go on to garner a 98% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes and set the record for the most-nominated film in the history of the Canadian Screen Awards, scratching the scrappy tech thriller itch that many fans of the genre had been left with after David Fincher’s 2010 “The Social Network”. There was something about Johnson approaching the narrative not as a fan, but as a storyteller with a specific set of visions and interpretations, that resonated with his viewers at that point in his career.
Although Johnson is known for his oblique approach to portraying cultural touchstones — like with “BlackBerry” — he still raised eyebrows after proposing to adapt the life of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain into film.
GQ magazine’s Tres Dean argued that any Bourdain fan’s interest in the chef’s life had already been sated by the chef himself across 14 books and 10 television series. Though the director stood up for his choice: “What I find is if something exists already in the collective unconscious — [such as] Anthony Bourdain’s entire adult persona — if that already exists, I really don’t want to touch it.” So what would Johnson’s portrayal of the famous chef look like?
A fun, summery movie — that’s what. The backdrop of the film is a tourist-filled coastal fishing village. Dominic Sessa’s Bourdain (‘Tony’ in the film) spends his time getting into fights, going to parties and working in the comraderous “Flagship” kitchen. There is even the all-consuming on-again-off-again summer romance which takes a front seat in the protagonist’s mind throughout the movie. Tony’s mentor in knuckleheadedness throughout the first act is played by Leo Woodhall, who starred in the series “One Day.” Within this tutelage exist drug deals, drive-in movies, adultery, shit-talking and beach bumming between shifts. Striper runs and new lighter tricks are treated with a spontaneous excitement and reverence. Although Tony has his dark moments, he also relishes his time in Provincetown — the fictional Bourdain’s hedonism stoked by the freedom of coastal life.
Yet the creative license that Johnson takes does not stop at its beachy and free spirited tone. Sessa reprises much of his “The Holdovers” character’s qualities as Tony he’s yet another nervy troublemaker who runs his mouth and continually feeds his own image. The character’s arrogance appears when he gets away with an elaborate lie or looks cool in the eyes of those he values. He is precocious, claiming he is an undercover writer-chef to his love interest, claiming he knows how to shuck an oyster before injuring himself at a party and smiling smugly when his suggestion is incorporated into the restaurant's menu. All this holds water in terms of a Bourdain portrayal.
My issue is that Sessa overwhelmed the character of Tony. To be clear, the actor has shown clear talent in both works I have seen him in, rakishly charming and awkwardly silly. I root for his “misguided youth” characters as they grow and develop within their runtimes. Just as Sessa can play moron, he can also play sobered young-adult-who-just-learned-to-think-about-others and continues to grow in each role he takes on.
However, there is a certain contempt and anger that is missing from this character. In Bourdain's 2000 memoir “Kitchen Confidential” from which Johnson adapted this movie, Bourdain states “I was angry at myself and at everyone else… I treated the world as my ashtray.’ He went on: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking” (the quote serves as the movie’s epigraph). Early Bourdain seems to be meatheaded and selfish.
“Kitchen Confidential” is full of self-mythologizing. As “Tony” co-screenwriter Todd Bartels has said, “Talking to other people and doing more research about those specific stories, so much of it was heightened and embellished and sharpened by Bourdain the writer to tell a good story.” This is fair. All the same, young Bourdain strikes me as a character with more cruel bravado, the type of meanness where one crushes bugs just for the sake of it. From this disposition, the chef seemed to have learned discipline, compassion, and maturity as he honed his skills as a chef. That arc is difficult to pull off in Sessa’s interpretation because the character starts off compassionate and without the indifferent bravado. In a scene early on, just after Sessa gets into a fight with Antonio Banderas’ character, he profusely apologizes and begs for forgiveness. He takes insults from his fellow chefs before working up the courage to respond. Sessa’s Tony cannot learn to express softness because he is overly soft from the jump.
Regardless, Johnson and Sessa succeed in creating a movie that gives us something different than any previous Anthony Bourdain media. The characters are lively and loveable, and for a movie on someone whose life had several dark corners, it does well to the adventure and lightheartedness that also defined the chef’s life. There is an emotional core and stillness that balance the film’s more jovial moments. Matt Johnson’s work is on the whole a fully-realized story covering a directionless adolescent discovering what he loves for the first time. A one-to-one documentary it is not, but to his credit Johnson never claimed it would be.
Gus Morrill '27 (he/him) is an Arts & Culture Editor.
He is a Comparative Literature Major with a focus in Spanish and Arabic. Outside of The Campus he is also involved with Matriculate, the Blackbird Literary Arts Journal, Club Jiu-Jitsu, and Middlebury Discount Comedy. In his free time you can find him knitting, listening to music, or watching his favorite soccer teams lose.
