The Summer That Changed Nothing

Tony is a biopic about the failure of love. The failure of joy. The failure of dreams. It is a film that refuses to mythologize the late Anthony Bourdain, and in doing so, somehow gives us a better frame through which to understand him.

Because Bourdain was not without faults. He was reckless. Immature. Angry. Lazy. Lost. Brilliantly entitled. And, eventually, humbled.

The man who emerged from those failures would become almost unrecognizable: a brilliant workaholic, writer, traveler and cultural critic who helped reshape the way millions of people thought about food and the world around them. With his punk-rock aesthetic, nicotine rasp, and seemingly bottomless charm, Bourdain became something close to a secular mystic—a cult figure preaching the gospel of movement, appetite and curiosity. Go somewhere uncomfortable. Eat what is put in front of you. Sit with people unlike yourself. Shut up long enough to listen.

Which is both surprising and astonishing because Bourdain, by his own estimation, was never a truly great chef. But he was arguably a great truth-teller. About food. About culture. About class. About people. About the strange ways we reveal ourselves when we sit down together and eat.

Above all, he was a brilliant raconteur. Bourdain made curiosity seem like a moral virtue. He challenged us to leap higher than mediocrity, to resist the numbing comforts of certainty and familiarity, and to believe there was always another table worth sitting at, another person worth listening to, another place worth getting lost in. For that, I will always be grateful.

But that Anthony Bourdain, the icon, is not really who Tony is about.

What the film gets right about Bourdain from the very beginning is contained in its title: Tony.

Not Anthony Bourdain. Not the celebrity chef. Not the bestselling author. Not the world traveler staring contemplatively out the window of a train somewhere in Vietnam. Just Tony.

Before he figured anything out, he was a lost young man who was, in many respects, a spectacular failure. He chased writing and girls with the desperation of someone who believed the bar was about to close, without having much success with either. He wanted desperately to become something before he had any idea what that something might be. There is something funny about this, but also something painfully recognizable. Ambition often arrives long before direction does.

The Anthony Bourdain he would eventually become is not the person director Matthew Johnson is interested in explaining, and I applaud him for that. A lesser biopic would be constantly winking at us. It would plant little signposts along the road toward greatness. Here is the moment he discovers food. Here is the conversation that turns him into a writer. Here is the heartbreak that teaches him how to understand the world. Here, the movie would insist, is where Anthony Bourdain became Anthony Bourdain.

Tony is smarter than that.

It understands that people don’t experience their own lives as biographies.

We don’t hear the score swelling beneath the conversation that will matter twenty years later. We don’t recognize the summer that supposedly “changes everything” while we’re living through it. Most of the time we’re simply stumbling forward, wanting the wrong person, saying the wrong thing, nursing some private humiliation, imagining ourselves destined for greatness while possessing very little evidence to support the theory.

That is the territory Tony inhabits.

The movie is deceptive in the way it unfolds. You could be forgiven for thinking it is going to become the story of the summer that changes our hero’s life. The trailer seems to imply as much. We know who Tony becomes, after all, and that knowledge creates an expectation the film continually exploits. We keep waiting for revelation. For the breakthrough. For the moment when the scattered pieces suddenly snap into place.

It never really comes.

And that refusal is what elevates Tony above the standard biopic. The film doesn’t manufacture a life lesson out of Bourdain’s youth, nor does it treat him as a saint merely because we know what eventually became of him. If anything, it embraces his flaws: his neediness, his selfishness, his hurt, his entitlement and that daunting ache to become “something,” whatever that something might be. Tony does not yet possess the wisdom of the man we remember because wisdom is precisely what he has not earned yet.

There is an important generosity in allowing him to remain unfinished.

So much of the conventional biopic is built around destiny. Childhood becomes foreshadowing. Failure becomes preparation. Heartbreak becomes motivation. Every wound must eventually reveal itself as a gift. The person we meet in the first act is treated less as a human being than as the rough draft of the legend waiting in the third.

Tony resists that temptation.

It allows failure to simply be failure. Love can collapse without revealing some hidden truth. Dreams can remain dreams. A summer can end without transforming anybody. A young man can be foolish, arrogant, wounded, funny, talented and completely lost without the universe quietly preparing him for greatness.

Knowing what Bourdain eventually becomes only makes this more affecting. The distance between Tony and Anthony Bourdain feels enormous. There is no obvious straight line connecting them. And perhaps that is the film’s most moving observation: there rarely is.

I didn’t leave Tony believing I had witnessed the summer that changed everything. I left thinking that was precisely the point.

The film’s refusal to mythologize Bourdain is its greatest strength, and its performances and direction seem completely attuned to that mission. They don’t ask us to search Tony’s face for the ghost of the famous man waiting somewhere in the future. They ask us to look at the person standing in front of us: confused, hungry, ridiculous, ambitious, wounded and alive.

Maybe that is a more meaningful way to remember Anthony Bourdain anyway. Not as someone destined to become Anthony Bourdain, but as someone who wasn’t.

Not yet.

Before the books and television shows. Before the flights and hotel rooms and bowls of noodles. Before millions of people came to see him as an oracle of food, travel and human connection, there was simply Tony, a young man failing at love, failing at happiness, failing at becoming whoever he imagined himself to be.

And then life kept going.

Perhaps that is the quiet grace of Tony. It understands that a life does not become meaningful because every disappointment was secretly leading somewhere.

Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we waste time. Sometimes we love people who cannot love us back. Sometimes we have absolutely no idea what we’re doing.

And sometimes, years later, we become someone neither we nor anyone around us could possibly have imagined.

Not because failure contained some grand design.

Because there was still more life to live.