Life will bring you plenty of unexpected developments.  A large part of having a Faith life is learning how to deal with these potential trying situations, and putting them in their proper perspective.  Last night, my girlfriend and I made it back from Disney in time for a late matinee showing of Tony, the new biopic about the college years of late celebrity chef Anthony “Tony” Bourdain (Dominic Sessa).  Unfortunately, the chosen theater had a faulty projector, so we had to get a refund and find a different venue.  One could dramatize such a development, particularly after we had been settled in our seats with popcorn and other food.  Apropos of such a film, my girlfriend had been enjoying an especially good batch of chicken tenders.  When we were told of the problem, instead of getting frazzled, I purchased tickets at another cinema and we left.  I believe you will see similar lessons here.

The only lessons in which Tony is interested is getting a panel of his professors at Vassar College to accept his proposal to write a book, hoping to get a fellowship to fund said venture.  His ideas are creative but disorganized, though he believes he might have swayed them.  He takes this confidence with him to a nearby watering hole where he goes up to Nancy (Emilia Jones) and asks her out.  His friends think he is crazy, but they have known each other since high school and he uses his expected windfall as an incentive to spend the summer with him.  She seems at least somewhat flattered, but says that she already has plans to go to Cape Cod for the season with a few of her classmates.  It is the first of many rejections for Tony, who is soon thereafter picked up by his dad, Pierre Bourdain (Rich Sommer), to return to his New Jersey home.  Though Pierre is excited for the reunion, coaxing news of the fellowship out of Tony, the young man does not believe his mother, Gladys Sacksman Bourdain (Dagmara Domińcyzk), will be interested in his writing.  Pointedly, mom calls Tony “Anthony,” and she is the source of his more intellectual side.  Dinner goes well enough, but as they are cleaning afterwards, the Bourdains get a call for Tony to inform him that he has not been selected for the fellowship.  Distraught, a few hours later he takes some money from Pierre’s wallet and heads for Providence, the Massachusetts town in which Tony hopes to find Nancy.  Not long after getting off the ferry, he finds her working in a local pizza shop.  He is also in time to see her kissing one of her co-workers.  To drown his sorrows, he lands at a private restaurant, sitting at the bar eating oysters and drinking far too many beers.  In a drunken stupor, he makes some clumsy passes at Mary (Monica Raymund).  They are enough to worry her, and she calls upon the Chef (Antonio Banderas), the establishment’s owner for help.  Chef tries to collect the bill and force Tony to leave, but the jilted lover refuses.  This forces Chef and one of his kitchen workers, Sal (Leo Woodall), to bodily remove Tony.  The young man passes out on the pavement and wakes up in the morning in a hammock on Chef’s seaside back porch.  Once he comes to, he is going to depart but finds that he does not have the money for the ferry fare.  As he is pondering what to do, he encounters Nancy, who is wondering what he is doing there.  Instead of admitting that he had come to see her, he claims that the fellowship had sent him here to write his book.  This appears to mollify her, and he gets an invitation to a party she will be at later that night.  Walking back into town, he passes Chef’s restaurant and goes inside to apologize.  Seeing something in the not-quite twenty-year-old, Chef offers Tony a job washing dishes.  Tony protests that he can cook and shuck oysters, but he must resign himself to his menial labor.  Once his shift is over, he and Sal go to the planned soiree, though Tony fails to win over Nancy, especially when her boyfriend appears.  Tony’s response is to spend as much time with Sal, who lives a fast life of drinking and drugs.  For the most part, Chef tolerates the behavior.  His rule is simple: show up on time.  Accordingly, when Sal is late one evening and puts Tony on the oyster station, the former is fired upon getting there well after the appointed hour.  With Sal gone, Tony begins spending most of his time with Chef.  In turn, Chef shows Tony how to collect local ingredients, especially from the ocean.  My favorite part of this sequence is Chef’s insistence that Tony attend Mass.  At the same time, things begin to improve with Nancy.  Tony convinces her to take pictures of him for the supposed book he is writing.  At this point, the project has become about him learning to cook from Chef, and to prove it he requests that she come to dinner one evening.  To impress her, Tony has Chef make a special dish of lobster thermidor.  Everything is going well, but Tony is fixated on her responses, and he misses a grease fire that commences behind him.  Because he does not have the kitchen experience he claims, he throws water on the flame, which leads to the restaurant being gutted by fire.  It proves to Chef that Tony is a fraud.  As for Nancy, she and Tony are about to have sex when he finally admits that he has been lying about his writing.  Seeking out self-destructive behavior, his wanderings bring him to Sal.  They break into Chef’s home to steal money, but seeing one of Chef’s old cookbooks gives Tony an idea.  Getting the kitchen staff together, including Sal, Tony organizes a charity clam bake on the beach.  Seeing the act of good will, Chef and Nancy take it as an apology.  While she expects them to be together back at Vassar, Tony instead enrolls in culinary school and that is where the film ends.

As Tony is being interviewed by the chefs at the culinary school, he is honest about the only experience he has in a working kitchen is the past summer.  What sways them is a letter of recommendation from Chef.  It is meant to mirror the beginning when Tony had woven a tall tale about what he planned to write, hoping to get the fellowship to pay for a summer of doing nothing.  As such, the lesson learned from the start to the end can be summed up in the old cliché about honesty being the best policy.  I have to confess that, as a Catholic watching Tony’s behavior, I sighed a few times watching his obfuscations.  Christianity is pretty clear on being truthful, beginning with the Ninth Commandment (Exodus 20:16) being you shall not bear false witness.  There are other Bible passages speaking to the importance of honesty, though it can be codified in the directive to follow Jesus, who is incapable of lying.  To be even more strident, you can locate other examples in Church history where people stuck to truth to the point of death.  That is beyond the pale for most of us because often lying seems easier.  It points to an unwarranted pride, one of the seven deadly sins, which the Church refers to as capital sins.  He does not want people to know that he had been passed over for the fellowship, or that he is a cooking novice, which might make him seem like less of a person.  This is never the case with God, which is one of so many reasons for why we should cling to Him.  As for the film, this would have been a lot different of a story had he been truthful from the start.

While it is accurate to call Tony a liar, his lack of character is perfectly balanced by Chef, a character that demands further analysis from a Catholic perspective.  This is not simply about him making Tony go to Mass, or demanding that people do not utter blasphemies in Chef’s presence.  Those are all great things, but they are manifestations of a deeper character, one that seems to care about God.  Not to wander too far off topic here, but one of the things that separates Catholicism from our protestant cousins is our belief in the efficacy of virtuous acts when it comes to our salvation.  Non-Catholic Christians, though our Orthodox brothers and sisters share Rome’s position, hold that only grace saves a person’s soul.  That is also true, but it is only half of the spiritual equation.  There is free will to consider, after all.  One can claim they are saved and then behave in a scandalous manner.  To say that such a person is still going to Heaven seems unlikely.  On the other hand, somebody who is committed to their relationship with God is more likely to behave as does Chef.  My girlfriend put it best as we were walking out of the theater and she commented on how impressed she was with his willingness to accept another person’s mess, in this case Tony’s.  I would have liked to have seen him take a stronger stand on the drug use, but she is right regarding his desire to show mercy.  That is Christ-like, and being a mentor to Tony and helping to turn the young man’s life around is a sign of what Faith can do.

If you are interested in seeing someone like Tony turn their life around, then this is the movie for you.  He makes a lot of mistakes you would rather not see a young man of his talent make, and I suppose this might help explain why he tragically took his own life.  This is a long way of saying that this one is a little slow, but there is some value here.