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Where is Melvin Milender Today?
As the booming success of Michael reminds us, biopics might be the most rigid and uncomplicated of film genres. Portray the subject as a morally-upright genius, hit a couple of big points from Wikipedia, and include lots of stuff that people love to reward the audience for their very good taste. Throw it all on screen and watch the box office numbers grow.
Some of that shows up in the first trailer for Tony, the A24 biopic about chef and author Anthony Bourdain. We get glimpses of his struggles as a writer, failing to get a Fellowship and then taking a job in a kitchen only out of financial desperation. He talks to a pretty girl (Emilia Jones), gets hazed by the kitchen staff (including The White Lotus‘ Leo Woodall and comedian Stavros Halkias), and studies under an exacting but brilliant mentor (Antonio Banderas). And, of course, the trailer has snippets of him doing what made him famous, finding the perfect phrase to describe the experience of eating.
And yet, there’s something different about the tone of Tony, highlighted by the way the trailer highlights the artifice of the story. When Bourdain, played by The Holdovers breakout Dominic Sessa, identifies the proceedings as a “coming of age” story, or when Jones asks if he’s a good guy or a bad guy, one gets the sense that Tony‘s doing something messier and more aware than the standard biopic.
That suspicion only intensifies when you realize that Tony comes from director Matt Johnson. Johnson’s acclaimed comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is still making the rounds in theaters around North America but he also directed the 2023 biopic BlackBerry.
