Welcome back to Multiplex Confidential, a place where I never know how to start off these posts, and it gives me insane anxiety. The first sentence of a blog post can make or break you and can completely turn your reader on or off to continuing on. And so today, I’ve decided to use those first few sentences to make a meta commentary on said sentences, which only further ensures that nobody will be reading this.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about Tony. When I first saw the trailer for this movie I thought, “Oh lordy, another biopic? And who is this Dominic Sessa guy anyway?” It wasn’t really on my watchlist for the summer, which was fully booked up with multiple viewings of The Odyssey and Spider Man: Brand New Day (both of which I quite enjoyed). August seems to have turned into the doldrums of the movie year, which is to say that there aren’t really any exciting movies being released. This year, the August slate consisted of Mutiny, The Dog Stars, PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie, The End of Oak Street, One Night Only, Coyote vs. ACME, and Tony. Not a strong lineup, at least for my taste. As the summer crept along, I started to garner more interest in Tony, mostly because reviews were finally coming out for it and people seemed to be enjoying it – so I gave it a go.
The reason that I think this movie works as well as it did, is because it really isn’t a biopic at all – at least by industry standards. Typically, a biopic will try to squeeze in at least 15 years of the person’s life into 120 minutes, they will hire the biggest star they can get to play the lead role, it will bookend the movie with text on screen hitting all the points they weren’t able to get to, and most importantly: it will never really work. Not to say that I haven’t enjoyed my fair share of biopics…I liked Bohemian Rhapsody, A Complete Unknown, Oppenheimer (which I hardly even consider to be a biopic), Captain Phillips, and several others. The biopics that work the best usually seem to disguise themselves as something else, while also only focusing on a small portion of that person’s life, or even a singular event. Oppenheimer is focused on the creation of the nuclear bomb, Captain Phillips is focused on the few days when his ship was overtaken by pirates, and Tony focuses on the summer of 1975. Others like Bohemian Rhapsody or A Complete Unknown try to capture the entirety of their subject’s career which is just far too much to squeeze into one movie. Getting back to the point – Tony takes place over the summer of 1975 when he worked in the kitchen of a restaurant in Provincetown and plays much more like a coming-of-age dramedy than a biopic. It sticks to some of the standards (there are title cards at the beginning and end) but it also veers away from those norms throughout, which is quite refreshing. The low-hanging fruit was right there for director Matt Johnson to turn this into a worse biopic; we could’ve followed Tony all the way through his years in college at Vassar and CIA, watched his relationship with Nancy blossom into marriage, and followed along through his journey of working his way up to executive chef at a prominent restaurant. Instead, he has the restraint to focus on the summer where he decided to become a chef instead of a writer. He also could’ve cast someone much more prominent than Dominic Sessa in the leading role. Truth be told, I had never heard of Sessa before, but it looks like he’s had a few supporting roles in the last few years, but this was his first leading role. The possibility was right there for him to cast someone like Joe Keery or Joseph Quinn or really lean into it with someone like Jeremy Allen White. Again, the restraint was key here.
Dominic Sessa did a really great job in this role, one that could have gone sideways. One of the other biggest struggles for a lot of biopics is that the leading role turns into more of an impression or mimicry of the subject, rather than an ode or nod to them. This was the biggest issue I had with both A Complete Unknown and Bohemian Rhapsody – in one, you had someone trying to mimic the very distinct and nasally voice of Bob Dylan (which is nigh impossible to recreate) and in the other, you had an American actor doing a British accent while also having to wear a huge dental piece to recreate the distinguished teeth of Freddie Mercury. Sessa was born and raised in New Jersey, a few hours’ drive south from Manhattan, where Anthony Bourdain was born before moving to New Jersey. No weird prosthetics to wear, no accents to learn, just a guy from Jersey playing a guy from Jersey; it works. There were certainly a few times where the movie felt melodramatic and like Sessa was leaning a little too far into the angst and moodiness of the character, but it would then remind you that Bourdain was 19 at the time and was still just a kid trying to figure out who he was.
Leo Woodall was also magnificent in his role of Sal, one of the cooks working at the restaurant that Tony eventually ends up at. He is absolutely electric and oozes charisma from the jump, something he seems to excel at. Woodall also starred in Tuner this summer, a movie I was hoping to see but never made it to my theater (I’ve heard good things though). I first saw him in season two of The White Lotus, where he once again jumps off the screen with charisma and coolness. It got me thinking on the drive home last night too…maybe we should be throwing his name around more in consideration for a certain Amazon MGM franchise that is looking for a new leading man?
The person who takes the cake for me though is Antonio Banderas, in the supporting role of Head Chef at The Flagship restaurant where Tony ends up working. I can’t remember the last movie I saw with Antonio Banderas in it (not to say he hasn’t been working, he just hasn’t been on my radar at all), but this feels like such a perfect type of role for this stage of his career. Chef is such a warm and fatherly figure to Tony throughout the movie, and everyone leaves the theater wanting to spend the summer at his beach house on Cape Cod eating clam bakes on the beach with him. Banderas is so capable of being the fiery, charismatic leading man that exudes personality and sensuality, but once again the restraint of this movie comes through and he is a much quieter and more subdued character. I would love to see him in more roles like this over the coming years, because his performance really shone through in this movie.
One last quick shoutout here – the score and music supervision were off the charts. Perfect needle drops sprinkled in with the emotional and understated scoring made for a lovely soundtrack to both the 1975 of it all, but also the coming-of-age dramedy of it all. Really well done here – you know you have my stamp of approval when I get home from the movie and immediately add the score to my giant “Favorite OST” playlist on Spotify.
One thing that will keep bringing me back to these biopics, as much as I might be annoyed with how many are being pumped out by these studios as Oscar bait, they all have a throughline – I love to learn new things, and these movies always teach me a lot about people I didn’t know much about. I knew who Anthony Bourdain was, I have seen some episodes of his shows, I even saw him smoking a cigarette outside of my office building in Manhattan when I worked for CNN, but I didn’t know anything about his life or how he chose to become a chef, or that he initially wanted to be a writer and scoffed at the idea of “working in a kitchen for the rest of my life.” But I now know a little bit more about him, and it has wet my beak to the point of adding his famous book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly to my reading list!