The Anthony Bourdain Mystery

A nthony Bourdain’s brand was passion: Galloping around the globe in search of extreme food and intense experiences suitable for television, he segued into a role as a lover of humanity, especially its poorest and least-attended-to members.

Then came June 8, 2018. What happened? “Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride,” he once said. How could a man joyously dedicated to sucking the marrow out of life discard his own?

The documentary Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain, by the Oscar winner Morgan Neville (who won for 2014’s 20 Feet from Stardom) attempts to answer that question but ultimately fails. Perhaps the answer is unknowable, but as is the case with most of us, Neville is reluctant to say “I don’t know” about a subject into which he has invested so much.

The best Neville can do is suggest that Bourdain was thrown into despair by being publicly dumped by his girlfriend, the Italian movie star Asia Argento. Shortly before he hanged himself in his hotel room near Strasbourg, France, photos had appeared in the press of Argento holding hands with another man. “Have a little f***ing discretion,” Bourdain was heard to say. Neville errs against fairness in that he does not include Argento’s side of the story; he didn’t even request an interview. (Another criticism being lobbed at Neville is a bit silly: For a few seconds, he uses artificial voice technology to make it seem as though Bourdain is speaking words that he wrote but did not record.)

But Bourdain’s friends and colleagues on the CNN travelogue Parts Unknown clearly despised Argento for taking their pal away from them before that. Roadrunner expends several frustrating minutes on an interlude in Hong Kong where — can you believe this chick? — Argento actually directed an episode of Bourdain’s TV series when the scheduled director was indisposed. Never mind that Argento has several feature films to her credit as a director and many more as an actress. Others who worked on the show insist that Hong Kong was a disaster where things started to go awry for Bourdain, but it seems rather that this is where his friends started to hate Argento; the chef himself said he thought that episode was a high-water mark for the series. After that little instance of bitchiness about Argento, I regard with skepticism the subsequent claims about her by Bourdain’s mates. They seem to think he was too clingy around her and make a strange charge that he was obsessed with her parking skills. His incessant talk about this, we are led to believe, bored her and led to the breakup. Really? I’m not convinced.

Bourdain had made passing references — it seems inaccurate to refer to them as “jokes” — to suicide before. He seemed to carry the possibility within him for some time. Was he manic-depressive? The film doesn’t say. There’s quite a lot that the film doesn’t say. Why did his first marriage break up? We don’t really know. Was he not devoted enough to his daughter to consider the impact of his suicide on her? Maybe, maybe not. On camera, he performs loving acts. But he allows that every time he was home for a few days, he wanted to go roaming again. So: not much of a presence in his daughter’s life. There is an interview with his second wife, Ottavia Busia, but she doesn’t provide many answers either.

Leaving aside the painful end, though, Roadrunner is a spirited tribute to a man in motion, beloved by his acolytes both for being a “bad boy” and for being a teddy bear who gave the world a great big hug. He certainly connected with his audience the moment he arrived, as an unknown chef at an ordinary neighborhood restaurant who with his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential brought fame to both himself and his employer, Les Halles. Such was the gusto with which he wrote that, though he exposed some unflattering secrets about his trade, he remained friends with the restaurant’s owner.

A polyphagist playboy for the social-media age, Bourdain personified the rise of a 21st-century creature: the foodie, obsessively scouring the world’s food carts and street stalls in pursuit of photographable, uploadable instances of transcendence. Bourdainism was incoherent and fueled in part by contempt. (“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn, the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”) But it was entertaining, and the participatory aspect of it made it appealingly democratic. Everyone can be a mini-Tony, to not only enjoy some noodles but write orgastic love poems to them, and the more ludicrous the hyperbole you use in doing so, the more Instagram fame you will achieve.

As I’ve said before, it’s all a bit of a religion or cult, and Bourdain was its charismatic pope. Such was the breadth of his authority that he became just about the only man whose thoughts on the #MeToo movement were in demand; he said he was against sexual harassment, and his fans swooned. When the adjective “punk” attached itself to him while he was staying in luxury hotels and surrounding himself with celebrities such as Barack Obama, it signaled that the word had completed its journey from denoting filth, fury, and absolute disdain for polite society into merely a marketing label for anyone who swaggers a bit while expressing mild irreverence within approved parameters. A Simpsons mention of Bourdain went like this: “I’m food Bad Boy Anthony Bourdain. There’s nowhere I won’t go and nothing I won’t eat, as long as I’m paid in emeralds and my hotel room has a bidet that shoots warm Champagne.” Sounds about right.