Off the menu special
‘Roadrunner’ serves up life & times of Anthony Bourdain
The high priest of spiritual expatriates everywhere, author, chef and food travelogue celebrity Anthony Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018, is the subject of Morgan Neville’s definitive documentary “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain.”
The film’s greatest asset, of course, is Bourdain himself, whose charisma, insight, self-effacing humor, vast knowledge of food and sybaritic enjoyment thereof make him the perfect companion on any food pilgrimage as he journeys across the world, tasting all that the world has to offer and never at a loss for something insightful, perhaps some historical-political observation, to say about it that we find fascinating.
This endearing host did not grow up in Provincetown as the film suggests, but in the much less glamorous Bergen County town of Leonia, N.J. After attending Vassar and the Culinary Institute of America, Bourdain, who sports a toque and wields a chef’s knife with equal aplomb, started as lowly dishwasher in New York city restaurants. But he made his way in 1998 to executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles on Park Avenue.
Fame arrives with the publication of his 2000 bestseller “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.” He hosts the food and travel show “A Cook’s Tour” on the Food Network, has a close working relationship with producers who find a way to shoot the show to match Bourdain’s informal, social, free-ranging, offthe-cuff style and helped the world to fall in love with him. But demons lurk.
The hard-drinking, chain-smoking, often foul-mouthed Bourdain, a culinary Hemingway, was a recovering heroin addict. He seems open to everything and everyone. But he almost never speaks of his parents. He marries late in life and has a daughter. But he travels 250 days a year and does not spend much time with his wife and growing child. He is more at home in a hotel room in Singapore than in the home where his wife and daughter live.
Sampling from a huge cache of existing footage, Neville creates a virtual Bourdain biopic with the subject playing himself and various friends relatives and other loved ones supplying the supporting cast. Bourdain’s widow Ottavia, his friends the actor and painter David Choe, celebrity chef Eric Ripert and musician and writer Alison Mosshart and others all share their memories and their grief.
Because Bourdain committed suicide, the film inevitably becomes an examination of the possible reasons why he did it. One factor seems to be an obsessive relationship the often depressed Bourdain had with the actor and director Asia Argento. The daughter of the Italian horror auteur Dario Argento, she is a pioneer in the #MeToo movement until she becomes embroiled in a sex scandal of her own. Bourdain’s troubled relationship with Argento causes him to fire one of his show’s most veteran team members.
Jiu-jitsu enthusiast Bourdain, who once appeared on “The Simpsons” as himself, had the face, voice and stature of a movie star. He was the hero of his own epic poem, celebrating food, travel and himself. He was a modern-day Odysseus, complete with Cyclops and Circe, supposedly striving to return home, but having a marvelous adventure (and meal) in the meantime. His fans miss him, and this film serves both as salve and as a reminder of their loss.
(“Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” contains profanity.)