At the start of Roadrunner, Morgan Neville’s (2013’s 20 Feet from Stardom, 2018’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) new documentary about the late food personality Anthony Bourdain, artist John Lurie, one of Bourdain’s good friends who has agreed to participate, asks for one final clarification about Neville’s intentions. “I want to make a film about why he was who he was,” Neville, recording about a year after Bourdain’s tragic suicide, assures Lurie off camera. Throughout the resulting movie, which oscillates from infectiously celebratory to powerfully emotional to, from a filmmaking standpoint, deeply frustrating, that quote hangs heavily in the air. Will we finish this attempt at portraiting feeling like Neville has satisfactorily fulfilled this proclaimed (but probably also impossible-to-achieve) ambition?
Roadrunner is archivally generous, capably made, and never less than compelling. But it falls short. It isn’t meticulous enough in its investigation of the private-facing Bourdain to feel like a definitive account of the “real” man so many would desperately like to know. (Until the I think overly invasive and recklessly speculative last chapter, Roadrunner mostly tends to be about as personal as Bourdain was willing to be in life; you expect a documentary with this one’s aspirations to do more curtain-pulling.) And Neville’s direction has an affinity for distracting, unsavory flash — one visual transition, for instance, cuts from water polluted with boar’s blood to high heels poking a red carpet — that finds its apogee narratively in a tabloid-esque third act that makes you question the director’s way of seeing more broadly.
Roadrunner doesn’t begin with Bourdain’s birth, as might be predicted for a movie ostensibly biographizing him. Instead, it opens in 1999, in the months leading up to the publication of Bourdain’s provocative and unexpectedly best-selling memoir, Kitchen Confidential. (Bourdain finds out it’s gotten a top 10 placement over the phone of the iconic New York brasserie Les Halles, where he worked his way up to an executive chef position, grinning in disbelief; he’s getting about as many general restaurant inquiries as words of congratulations.) This early section of the film — Bourdain’s abrupt transformation from little-known chef to superstar — is genuinely thrilling to watch, largely because there is a sizable cache of home videos Neville accesses to help illustrate the surreality of Bourdain’s sudden rise. There’s an easy, if bittersweet, joy seeing a cornstalk-thin, gold-earringed, still-writing-as-a-second-job Bourdain oblivious to the achievements to come in the briefly seen “before” period, with daily stresses relegated to whether an order of fish will be delivered on time.
From Roadrunner.
It seems odd, at first, for Neville to begin his story as Bourdain is turning 43. Was there nothing worth exploring before then? Optimistically, we figure we’ll eventually go back in time, to the very beginning; perhaps this is just a way in. But we never do. This placement suggests the birth of the public figure, in this case, might supersede that of the person. It’s an early storytelling red flag — a sign of questionable selectivity — that doesn’t become totally clear until we’ve confidently deduced that the first half of Bourdain’s life won’t be put in focus. Broadly, Roadrunner suffers from bouts of puzzling incuriosity, ushered in by this instance.
Soon after Bourdain is established in the public eye as a figure to watch, Roadrunner dives into one of its more fascinating segments: the early iterations of his television work. Bourdain wasn’t initially a natural on camera. He was shy, and tended to get more reserved the more aware he was of being watched. And he’d also very rarely traveled — he knew the world mostly through movies and books. Given how sophisticated and still-unmatched his TV work on shows like Parts Unknown (2013-‘18) was, we watch in amazement as his earliest producers and soon-to-be locked-in collaborators, husband-and-wife duo Lydia Tenaglia and Christopher Collins, recount how nervous they were during the nascent part of Bourdain’s public-facing career. Would their televisual gamble on this hot young chef pay off? Once the lifelong cinephile Bourdain began to look at the process akin to filmmaking, let himself earnestly enjoy new places and foods, and view the work as an extension of his writing (he was “maniacal” about voiceover narration, Tenaglia recalls), the persona most are familiar with began to germinate, then fully sprout.
Roadrunner jumps abruptly to 2006, with Bourdain and his crew filming an episode of his second TV series, No Reservations (2005-‘13), in Beirut. Now infamously, the shoot was swiftly interrupted by the commencement of the Lebanon War. We’re landing here, we’ll come to understand, because this was the event that led Bourdain to seriously reexamine his entire approach on TV. At first, he wanted to dump the footage completely: he was understandably repulsed by the queasy, pronouncedly privileged juxtaposition between a country’s violent reality and the vacation-minded, parachuting-in style long inseparable from food and travel shows. But eventually Bourdain decided to use, to acclaim, his experience as an opportunity to meaningfully meditate on broader inequality, pushing the limits of the televisual form he was typifying.
From Roadrunner.
This was an unofficial beginning of what would come to be Bourdain’s trademark. This was a food personality who used cuisine as a culvert into a specific culture and then worked diligently — albeit more exploratorily than definitively — to learn about those communities, to roister in cultural differences and interrogate Western misconceptions about them when they arose. An almost insatiable desire to keep traveling, keep looking for new experiences, was also very likely an extension of an addictive, often obsessive personality that could be both constructive and ruinous. (Bourdain was once addicted to heroin — something the film, as it goes with most things that happened before 1999, only discusses fleetingly and maybe more off-handedly than it should.)
Neville’s jumping-around-in-time approach is understandable as means to shrink what could very well have become an onerously long running time. And it can, as it goes with the extended focus on the Beirut trip, engender illuminating discussions of how Bourdain made the distinctive effort to not let his personal ideologies get squashed by the usual commercial considerations of the field in which he was working. But the many storytelling ellipses also produce more question marks when the movie is professedly seeking to uncover further lucidity. Roadrunner barely discusses Bourdain’s childhood and relationship with his divorced parents, his nearly 30-year marriage that ended around the time he became famous (the film casually offers a Sid and Nancy comparison), his professional evolution preceding his breakthrough, even where his passion for food comes from. The gap between 2000 and 2006 is rendered as almost disposable. Bourdain’s work on TV is negligently examined too, almost as if it was a little besides the point.
After the 2006 timestamp, Roadrunner continues propelling forward at full speed, though never again with such direct clarity around when a certain thing is happening. It affectingly contemplates how the pressures of being “Anthony Bourdain” — the figure — can weigh heavily on a person, forever nagging at even straightforwardly peaceful moments with loved ones and sometimes manifesting uglily toward friends.
From Roadrunner.
The last stretch of Roadrunner is off-putting enough to almost derail the entire movie. Focused principally on Bourdain’s brief post-divorce life, it spends most of its time on his relationship with the Italian actress and filmmaker Asia Argento. Bourdain met Argento in 2017 while filming an episode of Parts Unknown; it proved to be his final relationship. Neville, who didn’t offer Argento the opportunity to participate in the documentary, works to assure us that he isn’t trying, necessarily, to demonize her (paparazzi had captured Argento apparently cheating just before Bourdain died) as something of an angel of death. Neville includes someone repeating that Bourdain “killed himself; Tony did it,” with no one else to blame; his publisher in the same montage states that she doesn’t think we get to know the cause of his death.
But that Argento is responsible for Bourdain’s suicide is the sense one gets, watching the movie; it has, as noted by Dana Stevens of Slate, a “Yoko broke up the Beatles” tenor. It’s troublesome, not least because it’s a knotty practice as is to try to essentially decode someone’s suicide. The lurid Argento-centric suggestion, though admittedly plausible as presented, is inflamed by the several talking heads speaking negatively, for several dragged-out minutes, of this relationship Bourdain apparently viewed as means of salvation, how it seemed to unhealthily consume almost every facet of his life. This portion of the movie scans as less of a careful analysis and more a feeding frenzy, a chance to air out grievances; there’s a callousness that, no pun intended, puts a bad taste in your mouth. Neville editorializes so that statements along the lines of we can’t blame Argento for what happened come at the end of this act. But by then, the underlying message has already been heard clearly, and the one bearing the brunt of it can’t respond.
One might assume Neville opted not to include Argento in the documentary possibly because of her being a contentious figure. After becoming one of the leading figures associated with the #MeToo movement — she had been sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein and was outspoken about her experiences — it was publicly revealed following Bourdain’s death that, in 2013, Argento had sexually assaulted a teenage actor who had appeared in one of her films, and that Bourdain and Argento had allegedly arranged a payment to the actor to keep quiet. (The documentary’s framing of Bourdain’s vocal support of the #MeToo movement, it is also worth noting, is overly simplistic.)
From Roadrunner.
But in an interview with The New Yorker, Neville said he didn’t include Argento mostly to avoid what he foresaw as a sticky situation in the editing room. He didn’t want a “they said, she said” scenario — a choice that’s lazy and at odds with the film’s central goals of comprehensiveness. Though technically not a reporter, someone in Neville’s position shouldn’t duck a key conversation just because it could potentially bring unwanted narrative complications or personal discomfort. If anything, investigative storytelling should consistently challenge the notions you’ve already conceived as you continue accruing new perspectives.
Though I think the Argento section is far more ethically concerning, much more of a stir has arisen from the dubious ethics behind Neville’s decision to use AI technology to make it seem like Bourdain is doing a voiceover at certain points in the movie when in fact it is a computer reading lines. While I think this choice on the face of it is more unnecessary and uncanny than it is flat-out dishonorable, it’s another maneuver that speaks to a lack of consideration on Neville’s part that makes you lose confidence in him as a reliable storyteller. What’s more concerning, to my eye, is not the use of AI itself, but Neville’s attitude around it. Recent reports indicate that Bourdain’s ex-wife, Ottavia Busia, had not, in fact, cleared the use of it when Neville had told the press that she had. And when the AI use was questioned in an interview, Neville glibly replied that “we can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later”; he also refused to share at which moments the film uses the technology.
Roadrunner is still worth seeing despite how much its failures jut out. A lot of the archival footage is like catnip (there’s always exhilaration found when poring over never-before-seen behind-the-scenes moments); you can’t help but be interested in hearing from those closest to Bourdain, who are still trying to make sense of the shocking loss. Much of the film is indeed a joyous commemoration of Bourdain; you’re consistently reminded of what drew you to him, what made you love him (or at least the persona) in the first place. But Neville’s pronounced misjudgments ultimately cast a long shadow. They take the spotlight away from, sometimes even outrightly overshadow, its subject, when the effect should be opposite: a good documentarian should unequivocally make you see their subject in a new light.
Nicolas Cage in Pig.
BESIDES THE FACT THAT IT MAY put a strain on your eyes — it has an admirable though I think needless devotion to natural lighting even in very dark locations — Pig is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. It’s disarmingly funny, unforeseeably sweet, and consistently original. I’ll admit I didn’t anticipate applying these superlatives to a movie starring Nicolas Cage as an unfriendly hermit living in the Oregon wilderness who sets off on an impromptu investigation after his pet pig is kidnapped. The film is as much about literally tracking down the cute, though sadly very briefly seen, animal as it is about finding out who this man was before he became this. (Cage ventures, for the first time in ostensibly 15 years, to downtown Portland for answers.)
It’s implied that Cage is living in the wake of unspeakable tragedy just by how he takes care of himself. He can’t find time to take showers, change his clothes, wipe off the caked blood and dirt on his face that comes courtesy of the kidnappers; he is too busy, seemingly, mourning. As frequently funny as Pig is (Cage forms a note-perfect odd-couple bond with the comparatively sporty businessman who buys truffles from him and reluctantly becomes a traveling companion, played by a terrific Alex Wolff), it vividly conjures how grief can create a haze: how unrelenting it is, how much one painfully desires answers but will, of course, never get them.
Pig reminds us what a force Cage is when he isn’t phoning it in. You almost can’t help but lean forward when the character, who only speaks when necessary, decides to let a few words out. The movie’s best scene might be the one where they pour out most freely: his surprise excoriation of an old acquaintance at a hoity-toity restaurant so pretentiously fancy that he can’t be silent about how much it sucks. This is the first movie from writer-director Michael Sarnoski; I’m neither the first nor last person to say that I can’t wait to see what he does next. He’s made an audacious movie that never revels in its audaciousness; you never think about how ridiculous its premise sounds objectively. Sarnoski shows that within even the most absurd-sounding stories lies the capacity for unexpected tenderness and humor. Pig has plenty of both.
Peterson Reviews 