For days now, I've been telling anyone who will listen about my experience watching Tony. Every conversation has ended the same way – with my declaration that I loved it. I just wasn't expecting to feel guilty about saying it.
An advanced screening is still one of the best parts of my job. For a couple of weeks, you're carrying around a secret that most of the world isn't allowed to know yet. So, when A24 invited me to an early screening of Tony, the upcoming Anthony Bourdain biopic, I was ecstatic. Luckily my colleague Cass had an invite too. We signed our NDAs, ordered an Uber, and settled into our velvet seats in a near-empty cinema. Throughout the film I laughed out loud more than I expected, jotted thoughts in my note’s app, and found myself constantly impressed at Dominic Sessa's portrayal of Bourdain. I truly thought he captured the ambition, humour and narcissism that makes Bourdain such a compelling person in the first place. By the time the film finished – and on a killer song at that – I couldn't wait to talk about it.
But as the lights buzzed back on, it became clear that Cass – a devotee of Bourdain’s memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly – wasn't convinced that what we'd just seen actually happened. My excitement suddenly felt complicated. When a film is based on someone who really lived – particularly someone as beloved as Bourdain – discovering that key moments may have been fabricated or embellished changes the experience. Not because I felt tricked, but because my emotional response suddenly felt compromised.
Naturally, I did what any Gen Z does when looking for more answers: I opened TikTok. Under A24's trailer were comments saying, "Bourdain would've hated this," and "I don't know how I feel about this." They only deepened my unease. It’s funny how social media has an extraordinary ability to make certainty feel impossible, and I had willingly thrown myself into that spiral. That night I kept asking myself the same question: should I feel guilty for loving an adaptation that isn't entirely true?
I realised I'd been here before.
Earlier this year, Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights was an adaptation that gathered some controversy. Some loved it, while others argued it betrayed Emily Brontë's novel completely. Tail between my legs, I was one of the sceptics. While I admired Fennell's creativity, I'd struggled with how dramatically she had strayed from the original story. However, Fennell never pretended it was a true adaptation. She described the film as the version of Wuthering Heights she remembered reading as a 14 year old, a personal interpretation that filled the spaces between Brontë's words with her own imagination. The reviews, however, were a bit brutal. Book lovers don't receive enough credit for how fiercely they defend the stories they love – and I say that as one of them. Some of the most liked Letterboxd reviews were as entertaining as they were savage. One read, "Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis 177 years ago yet this adaptation is still the worst thing that has ever happened to her." Another stated that Fennell had stripped away the novel's themes in favour of a primal romantic fantasy that misunderstood the original morals. While I did agree with some of these points, it started to unsettle my compliance.
Why was I demanding literary fidelity from Wuthering Heights while happily embracing the artistic licence in Tony? The more I thought about it, the more I realised I'd been judging these films by different standards.
It's easy to dismiss an adaptation by arguing it isn't faithful to its original text. Accuracy often becomes the ammunition we reach for once we've already decided we don't like something and want to fire it with criticism. In Wuthering Heights, fidelity suddenly became incredibly important to me. But was it just because I wasn't enjoying the film? Tony exposed that inconsistency. Unlike a literary adaptation, a biopic carries an unspoken promise. Because this person really existed and that expectation makes fictionalisation feel more uncomfortable, particularly when the subject can no longer speak for themselves.
Yet director Matt Johnson never claimed Tony was a definitive account of Anthony Bourdain's life. Before its release, he described it as an "ass-kicking" interpretation rather than a conventional biopic – a portrait of one transformative summer rather than an attempt to summarise an entire life. Even Bourdain's estate embraced that approach, explaining that the film wasn't trying to document every fact but instead capture the complexity, curiosity and conviction that would eventually define him. "We chose to support Tony because it is not a standard biopic and doesn't attempt to summarise a life. We hope this film serves as a reminder that every journey has a start, and that audiences see the beginnings of the man who taught us how to be better explorers on our own paths."
That statement made me think about what I was asking of adaptations. I think we've forgotten that truth and fact aren't always the same thing. A film can invent conversations that never happened and still capture something authentic. It can shorten timelines, combine characters to become one or imagine moments between what was recorded as events while remaining truthful to the spirit of the person.
Seeing Wuthering Heights through that lens changed how I looked at Tony. A24 had always made it clear they wanted to deliver an impressionistic portrait of a life that was always larger than reality. Anthony Bourdain himself was a storyteller who understood that the essence of a place or a person rarely lives in strict facts, but how they make you feel. I stopped worrying about whether every conversation happened verbatim in a kitchen in the 90s. Biopics, like memories, are filtered through the eyes of the people telling them. One of my favourite lines in Tony was, "It's ok if it's blurry. It's how you see time". And I don't feel guilty for loving Tony. An adaptation doesn't owe us a timeline – it owes us a perspective. If a film can evoke the essence we all knew and loved of Bourdain – even through a partially fictionalised lens – or Wuthering Heights through a highly stylised memory of reading a book at age 14 – then it has done its job.
