An arrogant, pretentious 19-year-old takes a job as a cook in a Cape Cod restaurant and is forced to grow up.
In the opening scene of Tony, a comedy from Canadian director Matt Johnson, we see the 19-year-old title character, played by Dominic Sessa, applying for a writing fellowship at Vassar College in New York in 1975. Tony projects a persona of brash self-confidence that doesn’t succeed in hiding his foolishness. He describes his proposed novel as a kind of bildungsroman, a word that he mispronounces, which basically means a coming-of-age story. Here we have a nice bit of irony, because that’s what this film is: a coming-of-age story.
At a college bar, he brags to a young woman he has a crush on named Nancy—played by Emilia Jones—that he has been awarded the writing fellowship. She rejects his clumsy attempt to hit on her, but does mention that she’ll be in Cape Cod that summer. Tony later learns that he didn’t win, a fact he hides from his family. He suddenly decides to run off to Provincetown on Cape Cod in hopes of running into Nancy. There he promptly gets drunk at the bar in a local seafood restaurant, gets punched in the face and thrown out. He wakes up the next day in a hammock on the back porch of the restaurant.
The movie doesn’t go to much trouble trying to make Tony seem likeable. He’s pretentious, argumentative, and an inveterate liar. He considers leaving, but runs into Nancy and decides against it. Then he has the nerve to go back to the seafood restaurant, apologize to the owner/chef, and ask if he can stay on the hammock. He has no money, but the kind-hearted chef lets him work as a dishwasher in the kitchen. Thus begins the main action.
If you were to watch this without knowing anything about it beforehand, you’d see just a very funny comedy about a young guy in the ‘70s failing miserably over and over until he finally starts to learn a few things, including how to cook and how to tell the truth. Well, actually a brief quote in the beginning tips us off. And in the final scene Tony says his full name—Anthony Bourdain, who went on to become a famous celebrity chef and world traveler. The movie is based on the early sections of his memoir “Kitchen Confidential.” I don’t think it adds that much to the picture to know this. Bourdain’s death by suicide in 2018 is not mentioned either, and we’re only given slight hints from the occasional depression portrayed by Sessa in the film.
The restaurant owner and main chef, never named, is played by Antonio Banderas, and his steady performance gives the film a tremendous boost. One of the funny recurring bits has the chef waking Tony up every morning by pouring a bucket of sea water on his head while he’s asleep. There’s a raucous party animal in the kitchen named Sal, played by Leo Woodall. Tony attaches himself to Sal, who is a lot of fun but also crazy and self-destructive. This relationship is wildly funny, often in a dark way. Sal is the tough guy Tony wishes he could be, but isn’t. The kitchen scenes, where the conversations between all the cooks are laced with profanity and insults, I found hilarious. Even later when the film gets more thoughtful, it remains consistently humorous.
Tony is smart, fun, and wise. It captures a young person’s delusional “I’ll live forever so what the hell” attitude perfectly.
