Success is not always a component of fame, nor is fame a requisite of success, and neither one is easy to achieve. While the late celebrity chef, author, and TV personality Anthony Bourdain earned acclaim and respect for his books and documentaries, there are countless stories of those who strived for renown and fell short. Two current movies, Tony, depicting a crucial, career-sparking summer during Bourdain’s salad days, and Late Fame Late Fame a drama about a talented New York City poet who gave up his literary dreams as a young man, illustrate the gulf between a person on the cusp of greatness and one who never could break through.
‘Tony’
Anyone who had the opportunity to read Anthony Bourdain’s witty and revealing memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly or to watch his trove of globe-spanning travel shows knows that his death by suicide in 2018 at the age of 61 was a tragic loss to fans and admirers. An advocate of good eating and drinking, he was as happy to gobble a bite at a bustling, hygiene-challenged street food stand as he was to dine at a Michelin-starred restaurant. The anecdote-laden Kitchen Confidential includes more than a few sections dealing with Bourdain’s origins as a chef and bon vivant, and Tony, directed and cowritten by Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson, appears to have plumbed some of them. The result is a snappy, unsentimental portrait of an arrogant wannabe writer in search of a future.
This biographical slice of Bourdain’s formative days is dramatized with Dominic Sessa as Anthony, known to his friends as Tony. Sessa, who made his film debut opposite Paul Giamatti in 2023’s The Holdovers, doesn’t try to make Tony likable, but he’s compelling to watch as he tries to bluff his way from one situation to another. Bourdain himself was always frank about what an obnoxious guy he was, especially when he was a young man on the make. And that’s when we meet him in Tony. It’s 1975, and the 19-year-old Bourdain is enrolled at Vassar College. As the spring semester ends, he’s lobbying for a grant to write a book. With prospects dim, Tony turns his attention to fellow student Nancy, played by Emilia Jones. Nancy does not respond to his come-on. Undaunted, the smitten Tony follows Nancy to Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod for the summer.
Desperate for work in Provincetown, Tony gets a job as a dishwasher at a seafood shack overseen by a no-nonsense Brazilian chef, starts palling around with a less-than-trustworthy fellow worker, and learns some life lessons that will eventually turn this self-proclaimed lout into a fearless international foodie. Although it’s just a brief time at the start of Bourdain’s legendary, hedonistic odyssey, it’s a seminal one. It’s also a de facto coming-of-age story that resonates in an almost J.D. Salinger-esque way, as if Holden Caulfield, the psychologically damaged anti-hero of The Catcher in the Rye, was a kitchen worker at a seaside resort.
Sessa has to juggle a lot of conflicting aspects of Tony’s personality, and he’s impressive in the role, even in his most off-putting moments. As important as it was to get an actor with the right combination of magnetism, brashness, and insecurity to play Tony, there had to be a solid supporting cast alongside him. Jones, who has previously appeared in the prestige projects Youth, Fairyland, and Coda, is nothing short of luminous as Nancy, the object of Tony’s ardor. The versatile Leo Woodall — sympathetic as the piano tuner with incredibly sensitive hearing in Tuner and stalwart as an American soldier and interpreter in Nuremberg — plays Tony’s kitchen compadre and troublemaking buddy Sal. Despite his previous performances, it’s still a little startling to see Woodall playing such an amoral bad boy so convincingly. Finally, in a bit of a casting coup, Antonio Banderas is present in full as Tony’s gruff mentor/father figure, the Cape Cod restaurant owner and chef who takes a chance on a ne’r-do-well with potential.
Tony is beautifully directed, shot, and acted, evoking one sweet summer of yore when a jerk became a man or at very least, began his journey to manhood and a career of note. It’s not really a eulogy for Bourdain who had yet to earn a degree from the Culinary Institute of America and take on a series of esteemed executive chef gigs when this took place, let alone become the high-profile multimedia star that charmed millions. What Tony does is to show the sort of determination necessary to succeed at your chosen field as you start out. And without acknowledging the true-story aspects of the movie and the eventual trajectory of Bourdain’s life, it holds up as a somewhat nostalgic look at a go-getter seeking love and fortune while on the cusp of adulthood.
Tony is currently in theaters.
‘Late Fame’
A bittersweet examination of a never-was, coulda-been poet who finds a small measure of recognition years after he stopped writing, Late Fame is a modern adaptation of a 19th-century novel by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. The film gives Willem Dafoe a part that allows him to exercise his subtle side while also enabling him to bring the angst when appropriate. He plays Ed Saxberger, a New York City post office worker who briefly wrote poetry in his youth. Approached on the street by an over-eager, rich-kid type named Meyers (Edmund Donovan), Saxberger is flattered by the guy and informed that the former poet’s long-lost book of verse is a classic. Furthermore, Meyers invites Saxberger to join an informal salon he has put together with a group of peers, a somewhat pretentious group of young writers and critics that includes seductive, high-strung actress and singer Gloria, played to perfection by Greta Lee (Past Lives, TV’s Russian Doll).
Encouraged by the enthusiasm that Meyers and the group have for his poetry and beguiled by Gloria, Saxberger agrees to write his first new poem in decades for a special one-off happening that’s intended to showcase work by all of the members of the salon. Distracted by Gloria and dealing with writer’s block, Saxberger reaches a crossroads at the event. The entire group faces a reckoning in the aftermath, and the denouement is quietly heartbreaking. Dafoe and Lee are in top form as the situation plays out. In fact, Lee’s full performance of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Surabaya Johnny” in a cabaret setting is a must-see. Directed by Kent Jones (Hitchcock/Truffaut, A Letter to Elia) and scripted by Samy Burch, Late Fame is a melancholy rumination on deferred dreams and success that deserves to be seen and appreciated.
Late Fame is currently in theaters.
