Anthony Bourdain never pretended to be perfect. He speaks openly about his mistakes in Kitchen Confidential. He is refreshingly honest about his wasted years and the people he let down. I think that specific honesty is what allowed strangers to feel comfortable around him, and made Parts Unknown so successful. It’s also the reason I am so fond of Bourdain. So naturally, when Tony (2026) was first announced, I struggled to understand what exactly would compel a filmmaker to take on the colossal baggage of adapting his story. It felt like an impossible task. How exactly would you bring to life the story of a man whose loss feels heavy enough that collective grief around his loss has calcified him into a saint?
I do not use the word "saint" lightly here. Doing so would be blasphemy, and I am not one to take blasphemy lightly. I have seen Conclave and I am very familiar with the power that the Church holds. I have heard about what those guys did to Joan of Arc. Obviously, I don't necessarily endorse the Church because of the whole being Muslim thing (among other reasons), but I am familiar with their power and know better than to anger them by being flippant with my usage of the word “saint.” I use that word specifically, because Bourdain is a true victim of sainthood. In almost any American souvenir shop, you can find devotional prints of Saint Anthony Bourdain holding a utensil in one hand and a passport in the other. The internet has crowned him the patron saint of travelers, communion, and third culture kids. There are murals everywhere featuring him alongside preudoinspirational captions like "in a city full of villains, we need heroes."
Sainthood is arguably the cruelest thing you can do to a guy whose philosophy relied on finding grace in the dirt. My skepticism was mostly rooted in jadedness. I could not fathom dragging the legacy of a man whose most famous tattoo read "I am certain of nothing" through a media ecosystem that sometimes feels so devoid of nuance. Ironically, we respond to Bourdain's profound lack of certainty with absolute certainty. A Bourdain biopic seemed misguided, as it could take someone who passed too soon and keep mutilating his legacy in the blender of a cultural landscape that loves to factory package everything into Cocomelon. Bourdain's legacy has been through enough, and despite my faith in Matt Johnson (I will fight wars for Blackberry), I had reservations.
Despite the aforementioned reservations, Tony succeeds (wahoo)! I would attribute its success to its guiding principle of imperfection. Imperfection is also what I have come to personally mythologize Anthony Bourdain by. My understanding of Bourdain’s legacy might stray from the authenticity, though it feels very connected to Matt Johnson's version. If I were forced to distill Anthony Bourdain into one idea, it would be the belief that beauty is largely arrived at through radical imperfection.
Tony rejects the taxidermy of the modern conventional biopic across form and substance. The film opens with a line from Kitchen Confidential where Bourdain describes his seventeen-year-old self as a “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” Johnson anchors on Bourdain's own confessions and takes him at his word. Tony proceeds to spend the rest of its runtime lovingly and satisfyingly delivering the aforementioned ass-kicking.
If you truly love someone, then you love them for who they are, because of their flaws. If you want to truly adapt someone lovingly, then you have no choice but to put them through the Colossal Shithead machine for 106 consecutive minutes. Any other approach reads to me as cowardice.
Paradoxically, in its abandonment of hagiography, Tony (2026) turns Bourdain into a legend. Dominic Sessa's performance brings Bourdain to life as a remarkable shitbag with shitbag mannerisms. Tony lies about winning a writing fellowship, steals money from his family, and takes a bus to Provincetown stalking Nancy, a girl who he barely knows. He ends his first day in town by getting drunk, harassing a waitress, losing a fight and falling asleep on the sidewalk. Matt Johnson is an expert in the shitbag. Most of his films, from The Dirties to Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, follow a deluded dreamer who gets so caught up in wanting to be an artist that he forgets to live his life. Sessa’s Tony is that dreamer, and Sessa brings him to life as an everyman. This is a version of Bourdain that anyone can connect to, ubiquitous in his messiness.
Sessa's everyman finds himself caught in a delicious web of lies. Tony tells everyone in town that he is a writer, and that everything else he's doing is temporary. He uses an aspirational novel as an alibi for his existence, and he is conitnuously consumed by this idea of himself as a young man of words, immersed in his art for furlough from real life. Tony will go on endlessly about all the living the book has kept him from, listing the experiences he supposedly hasn't gotten to have because his writing takes priority. Of course, this is entirely bullshit. There is no book, but for the first time in his life, Tony has begun to experience living.
I have been living a version of this "lie" in my own way. For the last four years I have been relentlessly obsessed with drowning myself in the world of film. I have averaged at least five movies a week (sometimes even more depending on how much my day job asks of me), ravenously searching for some way to vicariously live through the screen and immerse myself in someone else’s world. Since I started FilmSlop in 2023, this hunger has intensified. Consumption became my art form the same way the unwritten novel was Tony's. I would watch movies hoping the screen would hand me a revelation. Movies started as my teachers, but somewhere along the line, they became my alibi.
Tony finds two teachers in Provincetown, both teaching him to live in different ways. Sal, the prep cook played by Leo Woodall, pulls him into a whirlwind of charisma through after-hours Provincetown. Their nights together feel magical until Tony realizes that Sal's swagger is just an artifice. Tony's other teacher, Ciro, the chef played by Antonio Banderas with almost no backstory, fishes Tony out of the gutter and offers him a hammock and a job. Ciro has one condition: that Tony show up on time. It is the first demand of Tony's life that he cannot lie his way out of. Ciro is the perfect foil to Tony. He attends Mass in Portuguese on Sundays. He is fascist about punctuality and aggressively devoted to same small daily rituals that add up to a religion of its own. His modest life of monasticism is genuinely incomprehensible to a nineteen-year-old whose religion is restlessness.
In the last month, I have made it a habit to catch the sunset every day. I know how cliché, overdone, and eye-roll-inducing this sounds, but I will be brave and say it. It has given me a sense of joy and connection I had stopped expecting from my evenings. I love the sunset. At times I have even sacrificed a weekday movie for it, and you have to understand the magnitude of that sentence because I am a strong believer in staying seated during a movie. I try very hard to not pee in a movie. I sat through the four hours of The Brutalist largely to let them know I could do it, even sitting through the intermission just so I could flex on those with weaker bladders. I mean this in a very sincere way. If you went to the bathroom during that movie and missed a single second, then I struggle to respect you, and I view you as a weak, fraudulent coward and a baby. A real cinephile sits through it and pees their pants. Yet, recently, I caught myself stepping out of a movie to catch the sunset.
The sunset has become my own form of connection to faith, and I've been trying to understand why two minutes of sunset time every day has felt so grounding. The obvious truth is that the sun doesn't pause and doesn't care whether you finished the movie and has little interest in your potential, much like Ciro's dishes. The deeper truth is that you struggle to love film as a way to understand the world if you refuse to actually live in the physical world. I was getting too deep in the zone. Just as Johnson and Sessa's Tony was intoxicated by the world and allure of being a writer, I was getting intoxicated by finding my life in film. I was spending my time inside the theater staring at a reflection of my life, ignoring the fact that the real thing was happening outside the doors. I have always known film as a dialogue with reality, and I have been dangerously close to cutting off the reality part.
Unpacking the beauty of the world becomes incredibly difficult when you are chained to a screen. The sunsets have been pulling me somewhere older and more grounded. The more beauty I let the world show me, the less deniable God became. My relationship with Islam has always been connected to nature, to how I see the world, and to my morality. It has been a nonlinear relationship. There have been stretches where I felt deeply connected. But there were also stretches of disconnect, and in those stretches I felt more isolated from my communities and my heart felt less open. The sunset is grounding in that specific way. The sunset re-connects me with nature, in turn bringing me back to the communities I care about, and I am beyond grateful for the people who help me get there. The sunset is a stand-in for more things than I can list, and my daily ritual of catching the sunset has been immensely grounding. Bourdain wrote in A Cook's Tour that perfect, like happy, tends to sneak up on you.
Slowly stepping away has been giving me my spark for film back. Watching the nineteen-year-old version of Bourdain that Sessa brings to the screen, I recognized how much I have grown, and yet how incredibly easy it is to slip back into a different kind of hiding. Before FilmSlop, I learned to love movies because every movie I watched was a genuine discovery. But lately, I was insulating myself in public film ecosystems by consuming more and more until I felt relatively numb. I had stagnated in my own growth and mistaken my personal plateau for the medium's limitations. Bourdain wasn't able to write his book until he had truly lived outside the fantasy of being a writer. In a similar way, I struggle to understand movies if I am using them to hide from the rest of my life. I am excited to continue catching those sunsets, to continue growing, and to keep engaging with movies the way they originally taught me to, from inside a life that I am actually participating in.
I remain unsure of what my relationship with movies will look like in the future. I know they will be around forever and I know I will continue loving and growing with them. I do know that at a 7 PM Monday Movie (a sacred endeavor for me of detoxing from work), I did something I would have previously deemed unforgivable. I stepped out for two minutes to look at the sunset, and I didn't regret it for a second. I might have missed a critical piece of the film. Two years ago I would have frowned upon this fool. The version of Bourdain that was in this movie probably would have approved.