THE JOURNAL
Mr Anthony Bourdain in Roadrunner (2021). Photograph Courtesy of CNN/Focus Features.
R_oadrunner_, director Mr Morgan Neville’s new documentary about Mr Anthony Bourdain, had 100,000 hours of material at its disposal and hurtles through it all like Bourdain himself hurtled through life. Bourdain’s TV shows – together forming a 16-year travelogue – used food as a Trojan horse to sate his curiosity about people, about the world, about himself. In turn Roadrunner, released in US cinemas on 16 July, attempts to unpack Bourdain, sometimes scratching the surface, sometimes opening up deep wounds. It begins with talk of his 2018 suicide before becoming an exaltation of a consistently vibrating existence. Dichotomy drives Roadrunner, presenting a man at odds with himself, who was forever trying to match an idealised, romanticised take on life with the reality, his own conflicting desires constantly wrestling for prominence.
The film kicks off just as Bourdain’s fame did, at 44, when, having paid his dues for a couple of decades, he wrote his raucous chef’s memoir Kitchen Confidential and then became the host of an ever-evolving series of shows that took him to seven continents. Those 100,000 hours of footage include 60 hours from an unfinished documentary about Bourdain from a couple of decades ago, behind the scenes material from the shows, and Bourdain’s own iPhone footage. What that gives us is a candid window into his permanently buzzing mind.
Bourdain consumed everything. He was sensitively attuned to it all, almost cripplingly so. He’d long kicked the heroin and crack addiction, but there was always an itch to scratch, and travel quenched his thirst, causing, Roadrunner suggests, considerable collateral damage. He so desperately wanted to be a family man, a great father, and, when he was at home, he was. But such domestication provided brief respites from his calling. He was compelled to keep moving.
Roadrunner’s strongest avenue of exploration concerns Bourdain’s battle with his own ego. Filming an episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations for The Travel Channel in Lebanon in 2006, as Israel bombed Beirut, he found himself caught up in a conflict that changed the way he wanted to make television. Four years into is career as a presenter, he didn’t want to fit the show’s template onto a reality that appalled him. He didn’t want to exploit a war, to make a fun show about food in the face of atrocity, and started sizing up the responsibility of it all. It would weigh heavy on him.
“Mr Bourdain modelled his early persona on his heroes from the 1970s, in love with the Ramones, befriending Mr Iggy Pop”
Bourdain modelled his early persona on his heroes from the 1970s, in love with the Ramones, befriending Mr Iggy Pop. Kitchen Confidential made him an icon himself, brandishing knives like weapons on the book cover, giving interviews in which he said that any cook playing Mr Billy Joel in his kitchen would be fired. In Roadrunner, though, we hear him say that he has rejected “cool”. Coolness, he says, is about not giving a fuck, and he gave a fuck.
Yet… of course he was cool, inherently cool, and we were inherently drawn towards him: he was magnetic, whether he wanted to be or not. In an ideal world, he said, he wouldn’t have been in his shows at all. Which wouldn’t have made for great entertainment or the incisive commentary that he was so naturally good at, but it illustrates his ongoing struggle with his own persona, of his disgust that he was on any sort of pedestal.
By default, we are the centre of our universes, but Bourdain seemed to resent himself for it. He hardly shied away from fame and was phenomenally successful, but, as we hear him say in Roadrunner, he started to question who all of his awards were for.
There is a perfect, horrific transition in the film, blunt but gruesomely effective. In Borneo we see Bourdain and some villagers spearing a pig; he stands ankle-deep in a river, gravely but determinedly plunging it in, rain pouring around him, the water under his feet turned to blood. Neville then abruptly cuts to a red carpet, high heels and shiny black shoes glittering in the sun, Bourdain in a tux at some showbiz shindig. This is the yin and yang he would increasingly grapple with. We get the sense that he was happier spearing the pig, part of the circle of life, free from the glitzy artifice that he’d created for himself. And Neville has also employed some artifice of his own. As he told The New Yorker, he used AI to create three lines of voiceover by Bourdain – words the chef wrote but didn’t say. The ethics are muddy, certainly as Bourdain’s widow Ms Ottavia Busia denied giving the director permission to do it.
It’s a complex excavation. Inevitably, and perhaps unavoidably grimly, Roadrunner becomes more invested in Bourdain’s demons and, of course, his death, searching for answers. It finds breadcrumbs that don’t necessarily line up. Bourdain left behind an 11-year-old daughter and he didn’t leave a note. There’s no sense to be made of it. And as the film becomes less exhilarating and more depressing, one of his friends urges us to remember him for how he lived, rather than that final year when he got darker and sometimes meaner, more disturbed and more disturbing.
Bourdain lived for extremes, even if he didn’t want to be doing so. He seemed hardwired to be doing everything all at once, addicted to the entire world. He never rested on his laurels and for better or worse, nothing was ever enough. For the most part, Roadrunner celebrates a man in thrall to life, and it’s exciting and inspiring. It also reminds us that finding balance, the constant calibration of it all… well, that’s not always so easy.