A mere six weeks after the UK release of his magnum opus – Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie – director Matt Johnson is back in British cinemas with a very different proposition in the form of Tony. Where NTBTSTM was a frantic, unclassifiable meld of reality and fantasy whose very existence seemed logistically miraculous, Tony is that safest of all cinematic genres – the biopic. Telling the story of a few months in the young life of the deeply missed Anthony Bourdain, it avoids the cradle-to-grave cliches that often plague films like this, but in replacing those typical beats with a much more easygoing hangout movie style, Johnson finds new problems. Tony might be very charming, but it is also staggeringly slow.
We meet Tony (as played by The Holdovers breakout Dominic Sessa) – at this point in his life, only his mother calls him Anthony – in the mid-‘70s. A young man convinced of his own cleverness but still searching for purpose, he’s just been turned down for a prestigious writing fellowship that he has been cockily telling everyone who’ll listen he’s a shoo-in for. Humiliated and furious, he runs away from his New Jersey home to Provincetown, Massachusetts where a self-pitying night of drinking will leave him penniless with a debt to work off to a kindly Brazilian chef (who remains unnamed throughout and is played with great care by Antonio Banderas).
What starts as a couple of shifts to earn a place to sleep while he gets himself together becomes Tony’s whole summer, learning humility and a new passion in the kitchen as he graduates from washing up to shucking oysters to eventually getting his own item on the menu. At no point in this story are Johnson and his co-writers in any sort of hurry; pretty much every scene meanders from start to finish with a pace that would make even Richard Linklater’s films look like they were in a rush.
This ends up a double-edged sword. It is nice getting to know this cast at a louche, relaxed pace, from Tony to Chef to Tony’s mentor/cautionary tale Sal (Leo Woodall, a real highlight) whose confidence and drug use mask a self-destructive need to be hated. The kitchen banter feels authentic, walking that perfectly fine line between cruel and casual and all the performances are compelling – Sessa resists the urge to really go for any sort of Bourdain impression, which is the right call – even if the film’s token female character Nancy (Emilia Jones), the girl of Tony’s dreams, gets basically nothing to do.
You do start to notice the slack, though. The dialogue here isn’t as sharp as Linklater’s best hangout movies and while Johnson does shoot Provincetown in a way that makes it very attractive, there’s not quite enough formal inventiveness or immersive atmosphere to offset the growing ‘going nowhere slowly’ vibes. Some scenes do really benefit from Johnson’s more long-winded approach – the distraction-fuelled build-up to an inevitable kitchen injury gives the film a sudden injection of unbearable tension that Johnson is sadistically patient with – but just as many fizzle out.
Unafraid to show its subject as a sheltered dick who really needs more life experience to justify his own very high opinion of himself, Tony feels like a biopic that the man himself would have approved of. It avoids myth-making at every turn in favour of sweary moments of smaller self-discoveries and classic American summer memory-making, all surrounded by unpretentiously delicious-looking food. It might not be 100% gripping or anywhere close to as inventive as Johnson’s previous film, but its loose rhythms still scratch an itch for the sort of hangout movies that increasingly seem to be a figment of Hollywood’s past.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 