Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021)

(On Cable TV, May 2022) I’m not one for celebrity worship or performative displays of grief when a famous figure dies, but Anthony Bourdain’s suicide in 2018 felt different. I first knew of him as an author than a TV personality, and I’m significantly more attached to writers than other kinds of celebrities. Then there’s the idea that Bourdain seemed to be the kind of person who was more alive than most people. From being a middling chef and a failed novelist, he wrote the literary equivalent of a Grand Slam with Kitchen Confidential and parlayed his notoriety in becoming a TV star with globe-trotting shows. He remarried, became a father and seemed to enjoy what life had for him. Much of Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain revolves around the big question left behind by his suicide in a small French inn: how did he end up there, doing that? The film asks itself the question early on, but completes a whirlwind overview of his last twenty years before getting back to it. Documentarian Morgan Neville (who scored notable hits with such films as Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) has a wealth of material available to him in telling Bourdain’s story: archival footage (including incredible footage of Bourdain as a chef in the late 1990s), friendly testimonials, behind-the-scenes material from his TV shows and quite a bit of writing/narration from Bourdain himself. (If you find yourself watching the film and having an instinctive alert that “this doesn’t sound quite like his voice” or “how did they get access to that narration?”, pay attention to your knee-jerk reaction – Neville used AI technology to -imperfectly- recreate Bourdain’s voice from some of his writing and let’s just say that this raises huge questions about documentary ethics.)  As an overview of Bourdain’s rise to fame and his many years spent travelling the globe, Roadrunner offers evocative material. While this is a very friendly biography, it doesn’t stop itself from commenting on Bourdain’s very dark outlook on life. By the time we get to the end of the film, we have layers to unwrap – Bourdain killed himself because he was depressed, yes – he was depressed partially because of a whirlwind romance and breakup with Asia Argento that affected his character, yes – but in the end, the impression left by Neville is that Bourdain spent a life being self-destructive, and his sudden fame, family life, and ability to do what he wanted were a reprieve from something that could have happened years earlier in different circumstances. Roadrunner shows the oft-unglamorous toll that his lifestyle took, spending months away from home every year, but also how Bourdain refused to make it easier on him… perhaps because he suspected what would happen if he stopped running. Neville is a crafty filmmaker in many ways – in addition to re-creating Bourdain’s voice, he also stages a mural defacement as a punk middle-finger of a conclusion. Both of those excesses are regrettable, largely because they’re futile: he had more than enough strong material here to avoid resorting to such manufactured theatrics. They end up harming a film that would have been much better without them. Still, for Bourdain fans, Roadrunner is quite a film – a perspective to his work that doesn’t contradict as much as it complements it.