Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021)
Directed by Morgan Neville
Written by Documentary
Starring Anthony Bourdain, Asia Argento
Release Date July 16th, 2021
Published June 17th, 2023
Late in the new documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, a friend recalls asking Bourdain how he managed to quit his heroin addiction cold turkey. This was a foreign concept to Bourdain’s friend, a fellow addict, who could not begin to imagine that level of willpower. Bourdain offered no real answer, just that he’d done it. It quickly dawned on Bourdain’s friend that Bourdain may have beaten heroin but he hadn’t beaten addiction.
Instead of heroin, Anthony Bourdain’s addiction jumped to other sources of pleasure or pain or experience, unattainable highs that could never be sustained in the same fashion that addiction to any drug either ends in death or simply losing the ability to get high all together. To me, this is a fascinating and thoughtful insight. Director Morgan Nevillve had a similar fascination with what Bourdain’s friend mentioned, how his addiction jumped from heroin to other types of obsession.
In the immediate aftermath of Bourdain’s friend relating this story we join Bourdain learning Jiu Jitsu. Bourdain was obsessed with Jiu Jitsu for a time, an all consuming obsession, addiction, that drove the people around him crazy. Another of Bourdain’s friends, a member of the crew of his television series, recalled being irritated by Bourdain droning on endlessly about the benefits of Jiu Jitsu, he was relentless in talking about things he was passionate about.
Bourdain applied this passionate obsessive quality to people as well, his wives, and his girlfriends. In a disturbing example of Bourdain’s obsession with and his addiction to very specific things, the movie recalls a time when Bourdain was speaking of his then girlfriend, actress Asia Argento, and going on and on about what he’d determined to be, her remarkable ability to parallel park. There is a look on Bourdain’s face as he’s discussing Argento’s ability to park a car in Italy that approaches madness, his eyes are wide, his gestures are broad and Argento appears deeply uncomfortable.
It could be argued that director Morgan Neville frames this scene to underline the effect but regardless, I couldn’t help but feel the implied discomfort and Bourdain’s mad obsessive zeal. The documentary frames Bourdain’s entire relationship with Argento, which came in the last years of his life, as an addiction. Bourdain was deeply lonely after the end of his second marriage and is seen to wonder if he is someone who can be loved.
In 1999 Anthony Bourdain, then already into middle age and seeing his life as one of working as a chef until they dragged his corpse from the kitchen, began writing a series of emails to a friend. This friend happened to be married to a publisher and after urging his wife to read Anthony’s breathlessly intelligent, urgent, and provocative words in these emails, the wife was sold, she needed to publish Anthony Bourdain.
That is the story that led to Bourdain’s national breakthrough, the bestselling book, Kitchen Confidential which turned Bourdain into the bad boy of celebrity chefs. The book was an immediate smash success story which almost spawned a movie adaptation starring Brad Pitt and did spawn a brief and uninspired television series starring Bradley Cooper. Fame didn’t come easy to Bourdain but once he embraced it, his life was changed forever.
The success of Kitchen Confidential led to Bourdain’s own series on The Food Network called A Cook’s Tour. The team behind Bourdain’s television series tell a terrific story about that show and how Anthony Bourdain was not the bon vivant personality that he would come to be known as, not right away. In fact, on the first trip for the show, Bourdain was listless and withdrawn, he refused to play the part of host and it appeared that the show was doomed.
It wasn’t until the crew arrived in Vietnam when things began to click. Bourdain loved Vietnam, it also helped that his friend and former restaurant boss joined him and perhaps brought out a friendlier and more excitable version of Bourdain. From there it was off to the races on a career that would touch the lives of millions of fans and inspire wandering souls to discover their own inner traveler.
From the outside, Anthony Bourdain had everything. His job was to go to cool places, have adventures, and eat food. His travels were exotic and beautiful and also provocative. Through his travels, the bad boy chef transformed into a deeply empathetic soul eager to tell the stories of the people behind the culture and food he was experiencing. This proved to be exhilarating television and in many ways, an exhilarating life but the strain on Bourdain comes clear as Roadrunner unfolds. The heart wrenching stories Bourdain sometimes told weighed on him more than his cool exterior let on.
In 2018 Anthony Bourdain shocked the world by taking his own life in the midst of a shoot for his travel series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. His death was a stark reminder that while you think you know a celebrity or you assume that someone on television has a life that is a dream come true, you really don’t know them. This aspect of not knowing Bourdain but wanting to, drive so much of Roadrunner.
Some have claimed that the troubled end to Bourdain's relationship with Asia Argento led him to take his life. Many read Roadrunner: A Film Abouut Anthony Bourdain as making that case, that Argento holds a responsibility in Bourdain's death. I don't see the movie quite that way. I feel that director Morgan Neville lays out the case that Bourdain's various addictions are what drove him toward a tragic end. Having chased a particular kind of high for his entire life, he finally reached a place where that high was no longer attainable.
I believe, based on what Neville shows us in Roadrunner, that Bourdain was 'addicted' to his relationship with Argento in a deeply unhealthy fashion. That parallel parking story may be cringe-inducing in many ways, but I believe it is the thesis statement on Bourdain's obsessive personality, his addiction to Argento being the latest thing that had driven his lust for life. When that 'supply,' if you will indulge that as a metaphor for a human being, is cutoff, Bourdain simply felt he could not go on. That's not Asia Argento's fault. This type of obsession with another person is not healthy and it was perhaps better for Argento herself, regardless of whoever she might be as a person, I don't know her, to get out of that relationship.
If you've never been the subject of another person's obsession, you don't know how strange and suffocating that can be. If you are the subject of someone else's obsession, you need to get out of it. It's not something that can be sustained or repaired. We happen to have some visual evidence of Bourdain's obsession with Argento and it's strange and haunting. It starts out humorous and slowly morphs into something pitiable and deeply uncomfortable. Anthony Bourdain's obsessions are what led to his death. His desire to be obsessed with something to distract him from unspoken anguish he felt and did not process or seek help for, are why we no longer have his brilliant mind in the world.
Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is brilliant, beautiful and tragic. It's incredibly difficult to watch but it's also engrossing and enlightening. It's a story that aches to be told. That it exists is a warning to anyone that an unexamined emotional pain is as dangerous and deadly as an unexamined and untreated open wound. Anthony Bourdain was bleeding emotionally and was unfortunately unwilling or unable to seek treatment for it. Roadrunner then is a cautionary tale about such deep emotional wounds.
