![]() Bourdain may have cut a swashbuckling figure, but he wasn’t prone to self-mythologizing, preferring to be up front about his own failings, fears, and dark moments - up to and including repeating discussions about mortality. The episode became a formative one for Bourdain as an onscreen personality, the moment he started tilting toward bigger and more complicated stories, food often an entry point instead of the main point. ![]() One of his regular cinematographers, Todd Liebler, recalls going to Beirut for No Reservations, only for the crew to find themselves at the start of the 2006 Lebanon War, holed up at a hotel pool while bombing took place outside. Bourdain’s creative partners, Lydia Tenaglia and Chris Collins, talk about recruiting him to shoot a food-and-travel series, only to discover how awkward he was in front of the camera. His boss at Les Halles, Philippe Lajaunie, recalls learning that his executive chef had written a salty tell-all about the restaurant industry only around the time Kitchen Confidential hit the best-seller list. The first two-thirds feel like a wake, and not in a regrettable way, with Bourdain’s friends and colleagues reminiscing and sharing fond and embarrassing memories of him. But for most of Roadrunner, the distinction between portrait and investigation is negligible. ![]() The montage ends with artist John Lurie questioning an offscreen Neville about how he expects to make a film about Bourdain when Bourdain “committed suicide, the fucking asshole.” “I want to make a film about why he was who he was,” Neville replies. Its earliest scenes contain a montage of its interviewees getting ready in front of the camera - a peek-behind-the-curtain trick that most docs use to create a sense of greater transparency, but that here has the feel of an impending interrogation. It’s why, surely, he tries to frame his film as an investigation instead. Rogers portrait, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, is certainly conscious of this. Neville, who got his start with episodes of Biography on A&E, and holds the current category box-office record with his bittersweet 2018 Mr. His life, with its abrupt end, doesn’t fit into the modified sine wave the formula demands - humble beginnings, slow rise, peak success, fall, then redemption or a reaffirming of legacy. Bourdain had no desire to be placed on a pedestal, and that’s an impulse that’s all but built into the basic bio-doc, which is informed by a desire to reassure its audience that the person they’re watching a movie about was important enough to justify the run time. ![]() His shows were made with the understanding that great meals were as likely to come from a roadside cart as a white-tablecloth joint, and they were founded (and sometimes cast doubt) on the power of food to bring people together. He made his way in front of the camera, but the back of the house, where things were actually cooked in cramped chaos, was where his heart remained throughout his career. His first burst of fame came from a book, Kitchen Confidential, that described the dysfunctional unseen ecosystem of high-end restaurants with a hilarious frankness, as well as a resolute affection. Bourdain - a chef who became a writer, a writer who became a TV host, and a TV host who got as close as a celebrity can to being universally beloved these days - had a pathological aversion to bullshit. Sometimes, it feels worse than that - in deciding to treat his subject as a mystery he’s trying to solve, director Morgan Neville makes some ugly choices when it comes to that subject’s suicide, before veering off into a conclusion that’s more cathartic.Ī certain degree of kamikaze honesty is, you could argue, in line with its subject, even if the results, in Roadrunner, sometimes go beyond messy into irresponsible. It’s more interesting than 99 percent of the biographical documentaries out there today, but the grief being showcased is so close to the surface, and the emotions still so unprocessed, that it can feel invasive. Roadrunner is a documentary about Bourdain’s life that is irrevocably overshadowed by his recent death - a standard-format talking heads and archival footage film that manages to feel unruly and raw and sometimes troubling. Éric Ripert, who found his friend dead in Strasbourg, France, where the two were shooting an episode of Bourdain’s CNN series Parts Unknown, politely and firmly refuses to address the incident at all when the documentary reaches its last act. This documentary about the life of the chef and travel-show host treats its subject like a mystery to be solved - and treats his death that way, too.Īnthony Bourdain died by suicide on June 8, 2018, and half of the people interviewed in Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain don’t seem like they’re ready to talk about it.
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