Remembering Anthony Bourdain in Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner

The Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville assembled much evocative footage of his latest subject, Anthony Bourdain for his movie Roadrunner, even controversially putting words in the celebrity chef’s mouth—literally using A. I. While the film’s critics are abuzz over this technique, Anthony Bourdain’s life and work are overall well served in Neville’s treatment as he tries to untangle Bourdain’s sad demise. Bourdain was first a writer, and sadly, a suicide. If the viewer had not read the 2018 headlines, that news comes at the movie’s start. This is not going to end well, he says, and by the documentary’s end, there’s not a dry eye on the screen.

Bourdain’s taste for artistic bad boys--Burroughs, Genet,--- was not merely literary. You get a sense of his lust for extreme states of consciousness. He disparaged Kerouac, by the way, who might have been a forebear for a man on the road. Beyond his work in Les Halles’ kitchen, his distinct writerly voice, and penchant for drugs, Bourdain played a role as a subversive food ambassador. What I liked best about his sensibility was his sly political slant. In 2014, at Guild Hall, when NYT food writer Florence Fabricant asked CNN’s Anthony Bourdain, which country was most surprising, he quickly answered Iran. Most Americans had not been there, and he seized a moment of opportunity. Now, he said ruefully, would not be the time. That was the Anthony Bourdain everyone fell in love with, the celebrity food maven who sniffed out countries for his “Parts Unknown” series, favoring smelly dysfunction over orderly functionality. Iran surprised him with a people that had the attitude, “Are you American? We don’t care what the government is doing; welcome, we want to know you. In a Teheran restaurant where they put flags on diners’ tables, they apologized, Sorry, all our American flags were burnt.”

Congo, he said was perhaps the most dangerous, run amok with warlords and militias. You don’t want to mess around. One minute you are fine, and the next everyone is glaring at you for being CIA. Known for his culinary adventures to these exotic locales, which he shared with us no matter how far he strayed from typical tv fare, when he’s back in the states, Bourdain told Fabricant, he loved best a bite at the deli; the flipping of burgers in his Hamptons backyard filled him with bliss.

What happened to shake him from bliss? What made him stray? What of the bad behavior of his last love Asia Argento? Roadrunner gets to the many demons without fully addressing them. The intense subjectivity of suicide is felt keenly by those who loved him. The rest remains a mystery.

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