C-Directed by Morgan Neville Review by Jon Kissel |  |
With Morgan Neville’s previous documentary on the life of Fred Rogers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, I hadn’t been watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood on and off over the previous months, so all the clips of the show Neville used in his film didn’t seem repetitive or overdone. There aren’t small children in my home who need the comfort of factory tours and Daniel Tiger that I’m overhearing in the background. Thanks to the pandemic and a never-ending need for more content, that’s not the case with Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, currently available in its entirety on HBO Max. This was a series I was actively revisiting in the wake of Neville’s newest documentary, Roadrunner, a biopic about Bourdain’s life that used many of the same clips from episodes I had just watched at home. This is the most personal and happenstance of all the flaws in Neville’s film, his first miss since winning an Oscar for 20 Feet From Stardom. Roadrunner provides little insight into Bourdain that he didn’t freely offer up himself, while also serving as an offensive hit piece and a speculative attempt into Bourdain’s suicide. It seems impossible that a subject of such introspection could be dissected in this thin of a manner, but that’s what Roadrunner serves up to its audience.
Bourdain, a chef turned author turned beloved travel host and cultural commentator, provides his own visual autobiography in the episode of Parts Unknown that Neville most heavily borrows from. In a return to the Massachusetts beach town where Bourdain first began his career as a teenage cook, he lovingly describes oceanside sunrises after a long shift of chaotic and productive work, bonding with his coworkers as tightly as a military unit that binge drinks and has sex with each other after their nightly duty is done. Bourdain inevitably moved on to greener pastures, but he openly wonders in the episode if that was the happiest he ever was and ever will be, and, like the heroin user he was for a period of time, is always chasing a return to that place. Roadrunner repeats this insight without providing much more on top of it. It doesn’t interrogate what life was like for Bourdain in this period beyond what he says in the episode, and instead gives it to the viewer in situ. It doesn’t wonder about the broader impact of Bourdain’s career, like how the restaurants he visited in his show were changed or the causes he used his influence to further. The readily available Parts Unknown footage and overreliance on it gives Roadrunner the feel of a clip show that CNN would’ve put on in the aftermath of Bourdain’s death, such that the pleasure of the thing is in recognition and not in any profundity of the thing itself.
Perhaps this was always the best a documentary on Bourdain could do. For a man who talked so much about so many things, personal and otherwise, the task is one of editing his words together into a coherent, bite-sized whole. Roadrunner resists this tack and hagiography in general, because no one who fashions himself after Hunter S. Thompson is going to lack for unflattering anecdotes. As Neville moves away from Bourdain’s biography and towards the end of his life, the clips are exchanged for talking heads from his friends and associates. Difficulties on set are relayed through crew members, where the frustration of turning around episodes in distant lands break through at the same time that the presumed gratitude of being able to work on a travel show makes Bourdain feel guilty for complaining at all. The mother of Bourdain’s daughter/ex-wife is interviewed extensively, and provides a window into their time together, revealing a Bourdain who took to fatherhood while still being the obsessive person who’d drop everything for judo practice, a skill that he translated into actual success in the martial arts field.
As difficult a person as Bourdain could be, the film’s greatest opprobrium is saved for Bourdain’s final girlfriend. Asia Argento is all but accused of driving Bourdain to his death in a sickening stretch. Neville stacks the deck by including a scene of her filming an episode of Parts Unknown when she interrupts a sensitive interview to correct for some technical aspect, as if something like that never happened in the dozens of episodes of the show. Is the alternative getting a poorly recorded interview and then asking this shaken refugee to repeat it from the start? Argento, a pivotal figure in the Harvey Weinstein case, spins Bourdain up as an advocate for women’s rights, something that talking heads criticize Bourdain’s passion for as merely his latest obsession, and his over-eagerness supposedly drives Argento into the arms of someone else. Broken-hearted, Bourdain is found dead in hotel room. Nevillle goes out of his way to include exculpatory talking heads that absolve Argento, but he wouldn’t have included them if they weren’t necessary to counter a narrative that he created. Suicide has a hundred fathers, and it’s cheap and tawdry for the film to speculate at all, especially when Argento is not a participant in the film.
Roadrunner stands out amongst documentaries about dead celebrities by lingering on the subject’s death in a manner that reeks of exploitation. Documentaries about subjects ranging from Amy Winehouse to Chris Farley understand that distraught talking heads saying the same thing about grief are not compelling. Neville does not. How many times can the viewer be moved by a talking head lamenting their dead friend before they can imagine Neville behind the camera, fist-pumping at another heartstring-pulling moment that he can put in his film? That kind of manipulation marks Roadrunner all the way to the end. Bourdain’s friend and artist Dave Cho defaces an LA street mural of Bourdain over the credits, a symbolic move of resistance to hero worship that the film would cosign while also not itself interrogating beyond a surface level. This guy was occasionally salty to directors of his TV show, ooooo. He was annoyed by all the people who wanted to take a selfie on the street, wooooow. Then, with some extratextual reading, the viewer learns that the mural was made by the film’s producers to be defaced by Cho, and Roadrunner becomes an ouroboros of the kind of self-congratulatory edginess that Bourdain would’ve scoffed at as dishonest and false. A famous episode of Parts Unknown has Bourdain sink into rage and despair after Sicilian octopus fishers fake a harvest, and don’t even bother to fake it well. Neville has turned himself into those men, and this viewer into Bourdain, drowning himself in frustration/liquor at a wasted opportunity. C-
Perhaps this was always the best a documentary on Bourdain could do. For a man who talked so much about so many things, personal and otherwise, the task is one of editing his words together into a coherent, bite-sized whole. Roadrunner resists this tack and hagiography in general, because no one who fashions himself after Hunter S. Thompson is going to lack for unflattering anecdotes. As Neville moves away from Bourdain’s biography and towards the end of his life, the clips are exchanged for talking heads from his friends and associates. Difficulties on set are relayed through crew members, where the frustration of turning around episodes in distant lands break through at the same time that the presumed gratitude of being able to work on a travel show makes Bourdain feel guilty for complaining at all. The mother of Bourdain’s daughter/ex-wife is interviewed extensively, and provides a window into their time together, revealing a Bourdain who took to fatherhood while still being the obsessive person who’d drop everything for judo practice, a skill that he translated into actual success in the martial arts field.
As difficult a person as Bourdain could be, the film’s greatest opprobrium is saved for Bourdain’s final girlfriend. Asia Argento is all but accused of driving Bourdain to his death in a sickening stretch. Neville stacks the deck by including a scene of her filming an episode of Parts Unknown when she interrupts a sensitive interview to correct for some technical aspect, as if something like that never happened in the dozens of episodes of the show. Is the alternative getting a poorly recorded interview and then asking this shaken refugee to repeat it from the start? Argento, a pivotal figure in the Harvey Weinstein case, spins Bourdain up as an advocate for women’s rights, something that talking heads criticize Bourdain’s passion for as merely his latest obsession, and his over-eagerness supposedly drives Argento into the arms of someone else. Broken-hearted, Bourdain is found dead in hotel room. Nevillle goes out of his way to include exculpatory talking heads that absolve Argento, but he wouldn’t have included them if they weren’t necessary to counter a narrative that he created. Suicide has a hundred fathers, and it’s cheap and tawdry for the film to speculate at all, especially when Argento is not a participant in the film.
Roadrunner stands out amongst documentaries about dead celebrities by lingering on the subject’s death in a manner that reeks of exploitation. Documentaries about subjects ranging from Amy Winehouse to Chris Farley understand that distraught talking heads saying the same thing about grief are not compelling. Neville does not. How many times can the viewer be moved by a talking head lamenting their dead friend before they can imagine Neville behind the camera, fist-pumping at another heartstring-pulling moment that he can put in his film? That kind of manipulation marks Roadrunner all the way to the end. Bourdain’s friend and artist Dave Cho defaces an LA street mural of Bourdain over the credits, a symbolic move of resistance to hero worship that the film would cosign while also not itself interrogating beyond a surface level. This guy was occasionally salty to directors of his TV show, ooooo. He was annoyed by all the people who wanted to take a selfie on the street, wooooow. Then, with some extratextual reading, the viewer learns that the mural was made by the film’s producers to be defaced by Cho, and Roadrunner becomes an ouroboros of the kind of self-congratulatory edginess that Bourdain would’ve scoffed at as dishonest and false. A famous episode of Parts Unknown has Bourdain sink into rage and despair after Sicilian octopus fishers fake a harvest, and don’t even bother to fake it well. Neville has turned himself into those men, and this viewer into Bourdain, drowning himself in frustration/liquor at a wasted opportunity. C-
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