For the uninitiated, this movie will be redundant and empty, and I assume if I do know some or a lot of the inside baseball about Bourdain, this movie wouldn’t add much that I wasn’t already aware of. We’re approximately 48 hours from the birth of my first child. It’s not something that Bourdain’s life is going to illuminate very well, but the mood in the house is blind optimism at the moment. I think it’s likely that a lot of dispatches are going to be from home for a while and I may shift to writing different sorts of movie reviews for a bit–we’ll see.
I’m going to leave you to read the reviews of this movie from NPR and Slate and the rest, mostly because the sum total of Friend’s and my knowledge about Anthony Bourdain could be summarized in the brief drive over to the theater in the following to sentences: “I think he killed himself and was a food writer,” and “All I know is that early on he did a loooot of heroin.” I went in cold, so to speak, and so in many ways, I think this documentary was not so much my demographic.
One thing I found surprising about the documentary is the way that it is so consumed with telling the story of Bourdain being broadsided by sudden fame in his early thirties after his first book Kitchen Confidential skyrockets to the bestseller list. His fame sort of preceded his persona as a worldly traveler. The sheer volume of tape from his shows must be intimidating to have known what to do with. For the most part, the trick of the documentarians is to pair present day subjects with tape of them in the period and then work chronologically toward his death. His life is split into roughly thirds based on his marriages and his increasing isolation.
Bourdain’s correspondences were vast and the breadth of friends interviewed for this project adds a lot of flavor to the storytelling. That being said, the investigation of fame and mania are not all that satisfying, I suspect, because the subject leaves a lot of open questions by virtue of his untimely end. Suicide is poor storytelling, as we’ve said many times before.
I’m not exactly sure what more need by said about this documentary, except that the final twenty minutes about Asian Argento accomplish very little and might have been better if they had dwelled more on the complicated character that Argento represents to the #MeToo movement in her own right. The film is oddly gentle and silent about the weirdness of her role in that movement, probably because everyone they interview is too polite to get into the mud to wrestle. Ultimately, it seems like much of Bourdain’s reporting itself is probably more satisfying than this documentary.
