Mark Reviews Movies: ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 15, 2021

One could call Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain a biography, since it does cover the basics of the subject's life in more or less chronological order. We see Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef and traveler, rise to fame. We see his career move from books to television as his star continually rises, and in the background, a couple of marriages seem happy, strain, and ultimately fail, while the man tries to balance the professional life he never thought he would have with the personal life he never thought he wanted.

The fascinating thing about director Morgan Neville's documentary is that, while all of this story does proceed in a chronological manner, it doesn't care too much about grounding us within the timeline of the Bourdain's life. The story unfolds in flashes of interviews, clips and outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage from the various TV shows that Bourdain hosted, some home movies, and audio excerpts of the subject's own writing.

The sense of the film, then, isn't of following Bourdain from one event, adventure, and milestone to another. It's of a continuous, almost formless escapade. The man seemed incapable of stopping, until, for reasons that no one can quite understand, he simply decided to stop himself.

Neville is, thankfully, bluntly honest about that inescapable fact about Bourdain. The film acknowledges, almost from the start, that, as Bourdain himself puts it in narration, "This story doesn't have a happy ending." Bourdain committed suicide.

It was a shock for his many fans and even for those who knew him well, even if they could sense that something had changed about their friend or colleague during the last year or so of his life. Was this something new, or was this still Bourdain, whose humor was often macabre or bitingly self-deprecating? How do we define the man after the fact: by his life, by his death, or by something else entirely?

That's the struggle here, and it's one that's faced, not only by the filmmaker, but also by the many people whom Neville interviews to give us a better sense of Bourdain. They are friends, an ex-wife, fellow chefs, and various members of the production staffs of the man's assorted television programs. Some of them are angry, either at the fact of Bourdain's suicide or at the man himself, and even they don't seem to know which, if either, is the appropriate target of their feelings. Some of them are still trying to comprehend why a man, who seemed to have so much and be so open to everything the world has to offer, would end his life and remove himself from the world about which he was so passionate.

None of them really wants to talk about Bourdain's death. What would be the point? How does focusing on that do justice to the man and the life he lived? That's what the people who knew Bourdain well want—to do some kind of justice to the man. That's what Neville gives them the opportunity to do.

Most of this, then, becomes a straightforward biography of Bourdain, starting with his first and unexpected taste of fame, arriving with the publication of his book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. It was a bestseller, although, at the time, Bourdain admits that the best part of his newfound success was the sudden ability to pay his rent like a "normal person." Throughout much of the nearly two decades covered here, that notion becomes a running theme for Bourdain: trying to be "normal," while also and constantly trying to figure out what "normal" is supposed to mean, anyway.

That becomes the primary conflict of sorts for the rest of Bourdain's life. The book brings him an offer to star in a television show, produced by the team of Lydia Tenaglia and Christopher Collins, who are among the several talking heads here. Those early trips, traveling the globe to explore the cuisine and culture of different countries, show how uncomfortable the man could be in his own skin. While he eventually gains the on-camera confidence that was so vital to his appeal, that awkwardness and that quiet do return, especially in those last couple of years.

It's almost useless to describe the footage of Bourdain's years-long trekking that Neville has assembled. There's a lot of it, for one thing, and for another, it's not really the ultimate point of this film. Those who followed Bourdain's career on TV might be reminded of his more noteworthy moments or see outtakes that never made it on television, and as for those who didn't, the many clips provide a fine sense of the kind of host, thinker, and empathetic figure that Bourdain could be—and often was.

It's all worthwhile, not only to see Bourdain at the height of his fame and his public persona, but also to track how his professional ambitions, his personal life, and the constant conflict between those goals gradually and more noticeably took their toll on the man. Friends discuss watching him physically wither or observing sudden mood shifts. One man is brought to tears, after recalling how his friend told him he wouldn't make a good father—because it hurt, because he knew it wasn't really Bourdain (Depression does that), because he now knows it was Bourdain's way of condemning himself.

Near the end, as Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain does directly confront Bourdain's death, Neville's documentary becomes less about its main subject and more about the people describing him. It's devastating. Bourdain meant so much to them, and his death has left guilt, resentment, and uncertainty. If there's a bigger lesson—and Neville is determined to make that point—to learn from Bourdain's life, it's that there's always someone to talk to and who's willing to listen.

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