Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain

Greetings again from the darkness. As the film begins, we understand there will be no happy ending. Anthony Bourdain committed suicide by hanging in 2018 at the age of 61. As it was reported, everyone was shocked. Oscar winning documentarian Morgan Neville (TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM, 2013) interviews those who knew him best, and by the end of the film, we are left wondering why these folks were shocked at how his demise.

Bourdain ... called Tony by those who knew him ... spent most of the last 20 years of his life with a camera focused on him, so director Neville allows Bourdain to tell much of his own story. "I got very lucky" is how he explains turning a dishwasher job into the position of Chef at Brasserie Les Halles on Park Avenue in New York, and then evolving into an author, talk show guest, and host of TV travel and culinary shows.

Perhaps you read Bourdain's first book "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly", or maybe you know him from one of his four TV shows where he traveled around the globe eating strange food and exploring unusual cultures. Then again, to some, he'll always be known as the guy who was filmed eating a live cobra heart. All of those bits are discussed here, but the real interesting segments occur as others talk about the man they knew/loved/worked with.

Bourdain's second wife Ottavio, his brother, his friends, his agent, and his production crew are all interviewed here and are surprisingly forthcoming in their recollections and insight into Tony. We even see clips of Bourdain with his daughter, though she is not interviewed. The descriptions add up to a complicated guy. A natural storyteller who was a control freak and hard on those he worked with. Yet he was also charming, immensely intelligent and articulate, and eager to make satisfying TV. He also comes across a bit lost as a person most of the time, never more than when he's filmed asking Iggy Pop, "What thrills you?" There is even a segment with Tony in a session with his therapist.

The film, and Bourdain himself, don't shy away from his addictive nature. He admits to a drug problem when he was younger, and for the rest of his life he jumped from one non-drug related addiction to another. His personal life seemed to take a turn when he fell for Italian actress Asia Argento and he became an advocate for the #MeToo movement. His tragic end is discussed, and maybe those closest to him were simply too close to see what seems obvious to us now. Director Neville uses no shortage of archival footage and photos, but it's the personal interviews that strike the emotional chord here. Two films, APOCALYPSE NOW and VIOLENT CITY apparently had a dramatic impact on Bourdain, and though the end is tragic, his legacy as an adventurous storyteller lives on.

In theaters on July 16, 2021.

Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain is not the documentary you thought it might be. It is not a fluff piece of praise about arguably the most famous celebrity chef of this century, nor does it claim to explain why he committed suicide at age 61. What it does do is thrill with his charisma, a personal magnetism that makes this tall, handsome man taller than anyone else in the room.

From the moment his Kitchen Confidential hit the streets and became an instant New York Times best seller, the food world had an apologist for its greatness and a foodie realist who trumpeted the greatness of eating around the world. Not even tales of his heroin addiction could dissuade food lovers from making him the emblem of in-your-face food fashion. Home videos of him at times such as when he berates a fishmonger in front of Bourdain's Park Ave steak house, Les Halles, are endearing.

As the doc depicts him, he is almost more interested in how a nation's cuisine mirrors its culture than the actual nature of the food itself. If fish is the Japanese signature food, then how it is presented is more important than the fish. He is roguish and bad-ass, not Batali or Emeril.

The doc is itself more interested in spying on Bourdain or tracking him walking and talking than it is in how he helps his or someone else's restaurant attain star ratings. Director Morgan Neville has found the most charming footage, much of it outtakes from the hundreds of hours of him at play and occasionally at work on his celebrated cable shows. The kerfuffle about their using a bot for some of his narration is interesting but does not compromise the overall Bourdain depiction.

The most fascinating "at play" is his intriguing love affairs with his second wife, Ottavia, and Italian actress Asia Argento, who eventually leaves him for another man and us to wonder if that split is the cause of his final act (he hung himself in a hotel room in 2018). Lamentably this great writer left no note to help us understand that inscrutable act.

To its credit, the documentary makes no claims to know why but neatly allows voice overs to make insightful, if not superficial, conclusions that this peripatetic celebrity could not find his place in even the most exotic places on earth. Ironically, Bourdain claimed to be an open book about his talent and his demons, but really never allowed the latter to reveal themselves or explain his exit.

My own inference from the tantalizing details of this outstanding documentary is that, like Hemingway, Plath, and Robin Williams, to name only three famous suicides, his talent and his charm overwhelmed even him, to the extent that they were crushing the real Tony out of existence. He never knew himself well enough to be able to save himself.

Who knows? The doc does well, anyway, showing the daily thrills of Bourdain, how much he loved people more than food, and how restless his soaring talent was. In the end, he may have been too gifted to be able to live with himself. And that's what I thought about Hemingway as well. Great gifts require great care lest they destroy.

Roadrunner: The Life of Anthony Bourdain is a fascinating study of a celebrated chef who was far more interesting than the food he celebrated.

Bourdain is no Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Joan of Arc. He's not someone who made a stunning contribution to world history. He's a celebrity chef, food and travel writer. But he was a man with a high profile whose suicide baffled a lot of people, including myself, leaving us to wonder why.

This cleverly edited doco lays that out. Finding the answer is not at all easy but the filmmakers did find it. There was no cataclysmic moment but instead a build up and confluence of factors over many years. A man forever searching for IT, throwing himself into new things and new people only to find that for him they weren't IT and could never be IT. The fact is, there is no IT. Or perhaps IT, is something much more simple and yet profound, as Iggy Pop tells him at one point.

This doco will stay with me for a very long time - unlike a lot of films that I find almost instantly forgettable - and deserves repeat viewing. If you're fascinated by the psychology of individuals then it is a rewarding experience.

Side note: On the issue of using AI to replicate his voice in some parts, I have no issue. The words spoken are his and the filmmakers intentions are noble.

This doc is well put together and very beautiful at times. It uses bits of audio book narration, clips from various Bourdain shows, previous press pieces, home movies, friend and family interviews and more - to tell the tale of someone that has fascinated many, myself included.

I picked up the audio book of Kitchen Confidential nearly a decade after it came out. I was a young mom who needed the escapism of a story in my ear to survive my dead end job. Tony gave me all of that and more. I listened to that book and Medium Raw, when it came out, over and over. I rocked babies at night to them, I typed hours of data into spreadsheets to them, I knew which chapters to listen to when I had had a bad day or needed to get motivated for a long day ahead. My commute was full of Bourdain and his voice became a comfort blanket. I watched the brief narrative TV show so many times I am frankly surprised some network didn't consider it for a reboot. I turn on one of his travel shows and fall asleep to it when I now travel for work. And I don't think I'm alone in that. I think Tony meant a lot to a lot of people for a lot of reasons.

This film can feel voyeuristic and terrible if you are just mildly curious about Bourdain. This might not have been made for you. Who it was made for is people who needed a safe place to mourn with someone who also cared for a person. If you feel like an idiot mourning a person you never really knew - join the club. But I think the beauty of Tony is that he let us know him in some way that made us also feel known. I needed to mourn the loss of my friend and maybe you do too.

Sensitive subject! Anthony Bourdain travelled to many many exotic and toxic places, He had to be prescribed an anti malaria drug. It is a fact that one of them is a killer - Mefloquine . If you have any trauma PTSD, addictions, altered brain chemistry etc...it can and will mess with your head.

My wife and I loved the movie and Anthony, we just wonder did they miss something .....