Documentary Releases: Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021) - Reviewed
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Courtesy of Focus Features
Just a couple of years directing the
most commercially successful documentary film of all time with the television
personality Mister Rogers picture Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and the Netflix
documentary on Orson Welles They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, filmmaker
Morgan Neville returns to the documentary feature with debatably his most
fascinating and polarizing subject yet with Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony
Bourdain. Released in theaters precluding an HBO
Max and CNN run three years after the world famous chef and television
personality took his own life in 2018, Roadrunner is at once a
celebration of the man’s life’s work as well as a deep dive into the weather of
the man’s soul during the final days leading up until the end.
Courtesy of Focus Features
Largely narrated by preexisting
voiceover narration, newly filmed interviews with friends and colleagues
including actor/musician John Lurie, the film tracks the chef’s meteoric rise
to superstardom after his breakthrough book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures
in the Culinary Underbelly became a bestseller.Following snippets of his show A Cook’s
Tour as well as Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and Anthony
Bourdain: Parts Unknown, the film paints a largely broad overview of the
man while stressing what the appeal of the show and the man behind it was for
so many viewers. While much has been made of the
circumstances surrounding his untimely death including but not limited to the
time spent with Italian actress Asia Argento, the film nevertheless tries to
provide all the facts in a nonjudgmental manner and refrain from taking sides.As a documentary its beautifully shot and
constructed with an urgent narrative design behind it and an evocative original
score by Donnie Darko composer Michael Andrews.Many of the interviews included throughout
are heartfelt and at times painfully sad.Hearing some of the recollections about what Anthony Bourdain meant to
those who knew him personally will cut right through even those who admittedly weren’t
fans of one of the television world’s most recognizable faces.
Courtesy of Focus Features
Roadrunner as a film will neither convert you for or against the man’s
cause and instead simply stands as a testament to one man’s life and how many
lives he touched in the process. Of
Neville’s films Won’t You Be My Neighbor? meant more to me personally
but nevertheless Roadrunner was an engrossing if not tragic tale of a
man who had everything and nothing. One
of the most fascinatingly heartbreaking documentary films of the year!
