Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain

2021: unusually strong year for biodocs

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Photo caption: ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN. Courtesy of HBO Max.

2021 has been an unusually strong year for biodocs. With the notable exceptions of Dean Martin and Kenny G, most of the subjects have been disruptors: Anthony Bourdain, Julia Child, Kurt Vonnegut, Brian Wilson, Guy Clark, John Belushi, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.

Along with Penny Lane’s surprisingly revelatory Listening to Kenny G, a good watch even if you never ever think of Kenny G, here are the best from 2021:

  • Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain: An unusually profound, revealing and unsentimental biodoc of a complicated man – a shy bad ass, an outwardly cynical romantic, a brooding humorist. A triumph for director Morgan Neville, Oscar-winner for 20 Feet from Stardom.
  • Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road: An unusual documentary about an unusual man.  Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys’ songwriting and arranging genius weighs in on his life and work.  Wilson’s old and trusted friend drove him around important places in his life – in the format of Comedians in Cars Drinking Coffee – and it paid off with oft emotional revelations from the usually monosyllabic Wilson. 
  • Without Getting Killed or Caught: This lyrical documentary traces the lives of singer-songwriter Guy Clark and his painter-songwriter wife Susanna. Their roommate was troubled songwriter Townes Van Zandt, Guy’s best friend and Susanna’s soulmate. This is a film about an unusual web of relationships amidst the creative process.
  • Julia: This charming documentary, affectionate and clear-eyed, tells the unlikely story of how Julia Child broke through every expectation of her gender, class and upbringing to become an icon in her fifties.
  • Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time: This uncommonly rich biodoc of the social critic/humorist/philosopher benefits from having been paused and restarted several times, resulting in hours of filmed interviews with Vonnegut in different decades. Very entertaining because Vonnegut was so damn funny.
  • King of Cool: King of Cool is filled with insight into an icon who was extremely successful at being unknowable. Dean Martin used his charm to mask his detachment. Universally beloved, his internal life was still never understood by his closest friends and colleagues – and even by his family. The filmmakers turned to the device from Citizen Kane – what was the “Rosebud” that drove and explained Dean Martin?
  • Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation: Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams were both gay men from the Deep South, who attained fame and descended into addiction. They also knew each other. Truman and Tennessee tells their stories from their own letters and from being interviewed on TV by the likes of David Frost and Dick Cavett. There is no third-party “narration”. It’s an effective and increasingly popular documentary technique, used in, for example, I Am Not Your Negro.
  • Belushi: We all know the story of John Belushi – a career soaring like Icarus, propelled by comic genius and then death by drug overdose at age 33. The new biodoc Belushi brings us more texture because of unprecedented access to Belushi’s friends and widow and to Belushi’s own letters, notes and journals.
Dean Martin in KING OF COOL. Courtesy of TCM.

Best Movies of 2021 – So Far

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Photo caption: RIDERS OF JUSTICE, a Magnet release. © Kasper Tuxen. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.

Every year, I keep a running list of the best movies I’ve seen this year.  By the end of the year, I usually end up with a Top Ten and another 5-15 mentions. Here are my Best Movies of 2020 and Best Movies of 2019 lists.

To get on my year-end list, a movie has to be one that thrills me while I’m watching it and one that I’m still thinking about a couple of days later.

THE BEST OF THE YEAR

Here’s the running list as of mid-July:

  • Riders of Justice: A character-driven comedy thriller, embedded with deeper stuff. Marvelous. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
  • Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised): Questlove’s magnificent revelation of the long-overlooked 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival – glorious musical performances at an important moment in our history and culture. In theaters and streaming on Hulu.
  • Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain: An unusually profound, revealing and unsentimental biodoc of a complicated man – a shy bad ass, an outwardly cynical romantic, a brooding humorist. A triumph for director Morgan Neville, Oscar-winner for 20 Feet from Stardom.
  • About Endlessness: The master of the droll, deadpan and absurd probes the meaning of life. One of the best movies of the year, but NOT FOR EVERYONE. Streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
  • Slow Machine: An incomprehensible art film that is surprisingly engrossing.
  • Special mention: Lune: This Canadian indie, the Must See at this year’s Cinequest, is an astonishingly authentic exploration of bipolar disorder. A mother and teen daughter must navigate the impacts of the mom’s illness. Played by writer and co-director Aviva Armour-Ostroff, the mom Miriam is the most singular movie character I’ve seen recently. Miriam’s streams of manic speech have the rhythm of poetry. On the festival circuit and not yet available to stream.

Note that you see Summer of Soul and Roadrunner in theaters this week, and you can stream Summer of Soul and Riders of Justice at home.

There’s still plenty of room for more excellent 2021 movies. I’m especially eager to see the new works from directors Sean Baker, Asgar Farhadi, Joachim Trier, Hong Sang-soo, Todd Haynes, Joanna Hogg, Pedro Almodovar, Jacques Audiard, Emmanuelle Bercot, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Arnaud Deplechin, Leos Carax, Francois Ozon, Paul Verhoeven, Ruben Ostlund and Valdimar Johannson. Stay tuned.

Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson in SUMMER OF SOUL (…OR, WHEN THE REVOLUTION COULD NOT BE TELEVISED)

ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN – bad ass romantic

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Photo caption: ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is an unusually profound, revealing and unsentimental biodoc. Rarely has a documentary revealed so much about such a complicated and ambiguous person. Roadrunner deliberately builds into a triumph for director Morgan Neville, Oscar-winner for 20 Feet from Stardom.

In Roadrunner, we hear from Bourdain’s brother, second wife and his close friends and associates. His friends were creatives – artists, musicians, writers, chefs. His work partners — agent, publisher, producers, TV crew – had all stayed with him for many years.

Bourdain attained overnight celebrity as the Bad Boy chef with his ribald and iconoclastic memoir Kitchen Confidential. That platform propelled him into his television career as a traveling professional foodie – and then as a professional traveler.

I didn’t know that, before his TV shows, Bourdain had not traveled outside the US except for boyhood visits to family in France. One friend observes that, “his travels were in his head“. Tony himself was allured by the chance to “have adventures while antisocial“. Bourdain’s brother said that Tony was “reborn” through travel.

ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN

Bourdain was so fun to watch because he was a kind of adult Holden Caulfield, perpetually aggrieved by phoniness in any form. The dark humor in his caustic observations was unfiltered. Yet, Bourdain was an unexpectedly shy man for such a bad ass. Often, when someone (including Bourdain himself) made an incisive statement, Tony would furtively glance directly into the camera – was this his “tell”?

His friends saw Bourdain, despite his overt cynicism, as a romantic . Romantics are always disappointed in – and sometimes betrayed by – reality.

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain does reveal what upset him on the night that he, cold sober, chose to kill himself. But it doesn’t label that disappointment as the simplistic reason for his suicide. Instead, Roadrunner thoughtfully documents his life as a “runner”, focusing his addictive personality on everything from heroin to jujitsu to evade his demons.

Ultimately, Roadrunner is about the people who loved Tony and his difficulty in accepting their love. The saddest scene in Roadrunner recounts when Tony dramatically summoned his producers and proclaimed that he needed to quit; he never anticipated that, far from pushing back, that they would be wholly supportive.

Bourdain was beloved by his fans (including me). If you need a dose of the sentimentality that Roadrunner eschews (and there’s nothing wrong with that), CNN-produced retrospectives are available in episodes 93 and 95 of Parts Unknown, which can be streamed from HBO Max.

[Note: Roadrunner has provoked some contretemps in the chattering class. A computer-simulated voice reads one of Bourdain’s emails as if it were Bourdain himself, and Neville chose not to invite Asia Argento, Bourdain’s last girlfriend, to participate as a talking head (although we see and hear plenty of her on film). In both cases, Neville was seeking the fundamental truth about Bourdain and made the absolutely best choices as a filmmaker. Ignore the hoohaw.]

One more thing – Neville went with the perfect ending for Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, so perfect that, now that I’ve seen it, I can’t imagine any better one. This is one of the Best Movies of 2021.