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Cross this one off the bucket list. For years My Dinner with Andre existed in the nebulous state to me, a shape without form. Similarly to things like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil or Bonfire of the Vanities, society at large had made sure I knew the name but made sure the actual context behind those names had not came with it. I knew it was a movie sure, but I didn’t know who Andre was, I didn’t know who starred in it, I didn’t know who directed it, I didn’t even know the year it came out. Nothing, and even though you would think that would spur me on to see it, but in all honesty I think it was because I had no expectations for it that I kept away from it for so long. I haven’t seen movies like The Godfather and On the Waterfront either, but I know that those are movies that I should be seeing. My Dinner with Andre? Who knows? If the majority of the films that I choose to cover are spur of the moment choices, then this might be the King of the Spurs, as I picked it randomly from a list of films that I came up with on a whim. It’s quite the honor, let me tell you.
Released in 1981 by New Yorker Films, My Dinner with Andre was directed by French auteur Louis Malle, who you might recall as one of the names behind 1968’s Spirits of the Dead, or more likely from one of his numerous award winning films if you’re one of those people who have watched movies that aren’t on this blog. Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride and every other movie and TV show with a shrill weasley character) plays Wally, a down on his luck actor/playwright who, at the behest of a mutual friend, agrees to have dinner with fellow theater person Andre Gregory (who would later go on to be in Demolition Man) in a fancy French restaurant. Andre was at one point a well-respected theater director and acting coach in New York City, but fell off the map for a while and came back a little odd. Over the course of dinner, Andre describes not only the circumstances that lead to his leaving, but also of the events in his life afterwards, the places he has been, the people he has met, that have shaped his outlook on life, society, and everything else. Who is Andre Gregory? Who is Wally? Who are we, at the end of the day? These are the questions that the film is attempting to answer, and maybe by the end you’ll know as well.
Just looking at the idea on paper, My Dinner with Andre seems like it would never work on screen. A nearly two hour long film that takes place almost entirely in one room, and consists of two people (although mainly one person) talking continuously through the bulk of the runtime. A couple cuts, some closeup shots, some music, and that’s about the only way you can tell Louis Malle didn’t just leave the camera on and went to get a sandwich. Sounds simple enough, but in fact you’re banking the entire film on the idea that an audience will find these people interesting enough to listen to for that amount of time. Which it turns out people were, since it ended up making 5 million dollars at the box office (off of a 475,000 dollar budget), but it could just as easily been some kind of one of those multitude of indie flicks that you end up ignoring as you’re scrolling through netflix. Also it would’ve been in Hindi, because netflix is super into Indian films as of this writing.
Like Waiting for Godot, the strength of My Dinner With Andre really comes from those performing it, in this case our stars Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory. Wallace, our audience surrogate, is perfect as the nebbish counterpart to Andre the eclectic bon vivant, who kicks off his career in the cinema as if he was born in front of a camera. After a while you almost fall into a sort of trance, as Andre weaves this complex tapestry of anecdotes, shifting from happiness to sadness to anger with this infectious enthusiasm that is serene and at the same magnetic. Although Wallace and Andre have vehemently denied over the years that the Wally and Andre of the film were supposed to be 1:1 representations of themselves, Wallace Shawn going so far as to say that the character of Wally embodied parts of himself that he wanted to erase, the way the dialogue flows and the way the two men interact with each other you could easily believe that this was less of a script that had been typed up on a typewriter and more of a conversation that happened to have been recorded and later transcribed. A sense of reality, I guess you could say, that other films often struggle with.
The conversation is the foundation of the film, that is obvious, and in so doing it is the part of the film most vulnerable to criticism. While Andre hits upon a couple points regarding the nature of truth in modern society, and speaks with enough conviction that it comes across as profound, when you take a step back and remember that this is a man who can travel across the world on a whim and apparently has no need to work you realize that most of what he’s saying is mostly anarcho-primitivist, new age hippie nonsense. That the way to fix one’s is to go off to Mount Everest or what have you and pretend that rocks have spirits seems to limit ‘truth’ and ‘humanity’ to those who don’t have to worry about buying food or paying rent. Yes people are alienated, yes western civilization is focused on money to its detriment, yes protecting the environment is important, but Andre’s opinions on it are couched in the ungrounded idealism and vague spirituality that had already crashed and burned in the late 1960s (which Andre holds up as the paraphrased ‘last example of humanity’). There are concrete, real ways to improve the lot of humanity and it doesn’t involve some neo-Luddite rejection of science and talking down to people who enjoy simple comforts as ‘tranquilizing themselves against reality’, but Andre doesn’t seem willing or able to give an answer that’s really worth anything. It gets to the point where I’m half expecting Andre to start going off about the healing properties of crystals, and half-wishing that Wally would just straight up tell him that he’s full of shit, but we never get to that point. Of course he doesn’t, because ultimately Wally believes Andre’s opinions to be valid and to some degree he wishes he could be like Andre, seeing the energy in a leaf or crying at the sight of an abandoned building, but I personally don’t agree with either of them, so I’m left rather frustrated. Which hey, the movie pushed me towards an emotion so it ‘worked’, but that brings us back to the central conflict for the audience, which is if you’re not interested in what characters are talking about in a movie about characters talking then it’s not a movie you’re going to like. But perhaps I’m too cynical.
My Dinner with Andre is, no offense meant to Louis Malle, a pretentious film. A one act play brought to the silver screen for the crowd that love to analyze, criticize and debate and not for those who just got off their shift at work and are hungry for some escapism, performed by actors confident in their craft. Depending on where you fall between those extremes is a pretty good indicator of whether it is the movie for you. As for me, despite my issues with My Dinner with Andre I’m glad I ended up taking the plunge and finally gave it a watch. Aside from bragging rights, it’s really given me the push to try more of those shapes without form in the future. Mostly the bad ones, but you gotta start somewhere.
I’m looking at you Waterworld.
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