Movie Breakdown: Roadrunner (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
I’m a huge Anthony Bourdain fan and his suicide in 2019 was pretty emotionally wrenching for me. In the last season, cobbled together after his death, there’s a documentary that feels scraped of the some of the bigger characters – David Chang, his ex-wife, Asia Argento, Eric Ripert – and a little empty. I’m hoping this film, directed by Morgan Neville with a Hollywood budget, fills in some of the empty spaces.
Post-Screening Ramble:
I’ve spent so much time with Anthony Bourdain over my life that I honestly came into Morgan Neville’s documentary unsure of what he could add. When Bourdain killed himself in 2019, I re-watched everything he’d done trying to find signs of what eventually led to his death. Aside from Bourdain’s low level disdain for being alive, his past as a heroin addict and the weight of life so apparent on his face – honestly, the chef-turned-writer-turned-massive-celebrity hides his crushing pain well. Morgan Neville’s documentary exposes all of it. There’s moments early in this film where they’re rehashing some of the greatest hits of Bourdain’s life – his time as a chief at Les Halles, the Beirut episode, the Congo episode – where I wondered if this was just a high budget send off for one of the great travelers of my lifetime. And I would’ve been happy with that, I think, just getting to spend some well-filmed, well researched time in the presence of this human I didn’t know at all, but still loved so dearly. It’s when Neville arrives at the last two years of Bourdain’s life – he’s divorced the mother of his child and shacked up with Asia Argento and, for all intents and purposes, gone a bit off the rails – where the film really transcends the material. Using a bevy of interviews with his crew and the famous friends he made over his life, Neville traces out a complicatedly emotional theory of what drove Bourdain to commit suicide. It doesn’t point fingers exactly, but it certainly shades in a certain direction and it is truly, unbearably sad. Neville is masterful in his dissection of Bourdain’s psyche and his editing of the interviews and the behind the scene footage from the hardest years of the show respectfully immerses the viewer into Bourdain’s inner self while exploring the persona he crafted. Bourdain comes across as a difficult man with a deeply romantic streak and an untended addictive personality, and the combo of it all was toxic and eventually fatal. There’s a tendency in these sort of bio-docs to give a proper, positive send-off to the subject. Neville doesn’t do that. Instead, the film ends with sad, sometimes angry people, struggling with the loss of a good friend. And it’s all the better because of it.
One Last Thought:
There’s a line from Doug Quint about how much of Bourdain’s life wasn’t a detour from the darker path he was always destined for. It’s a gutting moment in a gutting film.
Another Last Thought:
If anything, Neville does a fantastic job of just giving fans of Anthony Bourdain interact with his persona one last time. I loved this film and I think part of it was just getting spend two more hours with a dead person that meant so much to me.
