Dan Rentel ’27
Guest Writer
“Tony” is an enjoyable summer romp that wants you to forget that it said it would be a coming-of-age story. The movie follows college-aged Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa), who has fled to Provincetown to escape responsibilities at home and to chase after a girl, Nancy (Emilia Jones). In Provincetown, he begins to work in a kitchen under the guidance of a man known as “Chef” (Antonio Banderas) and with three other men: Sal, Stavros, and Tyrone (Leo Woodall, Stavros Halkias, and Michael Jibrin).
The movie wants you to know that Bourdain is a terrible person. This isn’t necessarily bad; a coming-of-age story is a genre whose pleasure is found in watching a boy become a man. Unfortunately, though, Sessa can’t anchor the character in such a way that makes his growth feel satisfying. He’s too wildly unpleasant at the beginning, and from there, his development is too obscure. To a certain point, it’s Sessa’s job to help us sympathize with the character and appreciate his journey to manhood, but he doesn’t. He’s not a terrible actor, but he’s not that good, either, and in most scenes, your eyes follow whomever he’s acting with. The script isn’t doing Sessa any favors, pushing all the personality-building that’s supposed to happen throughout the third act to the final ten minutes. The dark night of the soul, when it seems that Tony is about to do something really bad, is cut short, then brushed aside. He’s suddenly a man, and instead of reaching a hideous low, he is magically whisked to a boring height.
I’m a fan of Matt Johnson, who directed this movie and co-wrote its screenplay, but he’s out of his element here. His usual style is improvisational and loose: despite having begun directing in 2007, his first movie with a full screenplay was 2023’s “Blackberry”. For “Tony,” he was only one of four screenwriters: the other three are Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe. Miller is a regular collaborator of Johnson’s, while Bartels and Howe are new (both to working with Johnson and to writing feature films), and you can certainly feel a push-and-pull between sticky sentimentality and more controlled, enjoyable chaos.
There are times, though, when Johnson’s mischievous comedic sensibilities begin to appear: when Bourdain makes stupid mistakes in front of the people from whom he begs a scholarship, in the chaos of working in the kitchen, when Leo Woodall’s character hooks up with girls at a party where Bourdain was trying to get some play. And this isn’t to say, either, that Johnson never succeeds outside of fun and games. Antonio Banderas and Leo Woodall are such terrific actors that they make the drama work. In the scene where Sal does heroin in front of Bourdain, it’s as if you’re watching a different, better movie. Or when Sal slaps Chef and dares Chef to fire him, but Chef whispers that he can’t: he likes him. Sal doesn’t know how to answer, so he storms out. It’s heartbreaking.
Those moments are great, but in a way most of the movie isn’t. One finds the meat and potatoes of the joy in the summer feeling that Johnson creates with his cinematographer, Michael Bauman. Bauman was a lighting technician for decades before getting his first cinematography credit on Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza.” That movie’s lighting, though, would have you believe that someone who had lit dozens of films was on that one: it perfectly captures the summer sun, coloring all your memories of the scenes with a dreamy haze. Bauman’s talent is used well here: sometimes, even magnificently. One shot in particular has stuck itself in my brain: it’s just a wide shot of a house at sunset, but something about it is beautiful enough to make you gasp. At its best, “Tony” gives you a wonderfully summery feeling: the joy of spending time with your friends after a hard day of work as you look at the twilit sky.
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