One of the first faces we see in Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain belongs to John Lurie, the musician/actor/painter who was Bourdain’s friend and who appeared on Bourdain’s television show Parts Unknown in 2018. Lurie, speaking to someone off-camera, questions what kind of a film he is being interviewed for given Bourdain’s 2018 suicide. An off-camera voice – which I assume is that of director Morgan Neville – reassures Lurie that the film will depict Bourdain in all his brilliance and complexity. Lurie’s questions lingered with me after the thoughtfully made but not-quite-there Roadrunner ended, because I think he understood that Neville would have to make a choice between reinforcing our ideas about Bourdain as a romantic figure or upending what we think we know about the man. In thinking about the film and its attendant controversies, it is fair to ask if the right balance was achieved.
Anthony Bourdain became famous after the 2000 publication of his memoir Kitchen Confidential, which took readers from his humble first dishwashing job through addiction and eventual success on the New York culinary scene. After the book’s success, Bourdain was contacted by producers Lydia Tenaglia and Christopher Collins with the idea of doing a television show to go along with a follow-up book. Tenaglia and Collins (a married couple) worked with Bourdain for the rest of his life and their memories and the copious amount of footage they and their crews gathered of Bourdain are the spine of Roadrunner. The amount of handsome footage of Bourdain walking, smoking, and otherwise behaving in various locations around the globe that Neville uses makes one think that an alternate movie could be assembled, one in which Bourdain comes off as a mildly irascible family man and a great boss. In the movie that we get, Bourdain is all energy. He’s devoted to his young daughter when at home – Roadrunneralso includes what appear to be private cell phone videos – but as the years go by also jittering to get back on the road. The amount of time Bourdain spends traveling becomes an issue of bigger and bigger importance to the point that footage of Bourdain participating in the culturally appropriate but still disturbing butchering of an animal is assigned a Kurtz-like level of disassociation with Western society.
Every choice made proscribes another choice. This self-evident truth crosses boundaries between art forms, but our expectations of a biographical documentary are of a particular kind of blunt honesty. What happened? What did it mean? What caused it? We understand from Roadrunner that Bourdain was a magnetic figure who at his best achieved a moving vulnerability to different kinds of human experience which translated to a wide audience. To be fair, he seems also to have actually been a good boss. A number of crew members who worked with Bourdain for over a decade testify to that, even though they at times found him frustrating. Morgan Neville makes choices in Roadrunner around the last act of Bourdain’s life that grind the gears, most notably the use of an AI voice to recreate Bourdain speaking words that in at least one instance were taken from a private email. If I hadn’t known about the use of AI before seeing Roadrunner then I wouldn’t have recognized anything disruptive in the film, but having Bourdain’s private words read aloud creates the impression that he was more vulnerable and self-aware than he actually was. Instead I wanted more footage of people like Eric Ripert and Iggy Pop, both of whom in different ways push Bourdain towards actively finding some kind of happiness.
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