DVD Review Of My Dinner With Andre
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 6/19/10
I have long
claimed that film, as an art form, is more an extension of literature than it is
photography. By that I mean that, as John Huston, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman,
and other great film directors believed, one simply cannot make a great film
without a great screenplay. But, one can make a great film without great
visuals. Never has there been a better exemplar of that reality than Louis
Malle’s 111 minute long, 1981 drama My Dinner With Andre. It is a
perfect example of what I have dubbed cinemature. There are some nicely
composed shots, and some well-framed close-ups, but the film simply does little
to play with the visuals; and the truth is that most films simply do not need
such, if there is a good screenplay from which to feed off of. Of course, a
great visual style, or visual flourishes, can add to a great screenplay, but,
lacking that great bit of writing, no amount of visual wonderment can make a
film that one will not yawn to after the third or fourth time watched. This is
why so much of recent cinema, especially from Hollywood, is so forgettable.
Video game level stories, paper-thin characters, and computer graphics simply do
not add up to art. Individually, one of them can contribute to art, if done
well, but done poorly, they are detractions. And, sans a good underlying
screenplay, driven by character and not plot, nothing can save that sort of film
from instant forgettability.
My Dinner
With Andre is not forgettable. Nor is it many of the other things that bad
critics and lazy thinkers have labeled (or libeled) it the last three decades.
It simply is a tour de force dialectic between two slightly above average
intelligence wannabe intellectuals. That neither man is as smart as he thinks he
is, is not the point. Nor is the fact that both are demonstrably smarter than
most of the people who will watch the film. The point of the film is that these
are two individuals interested in things beyond themselves. They are not
solipsists. Solipsism is one of the great flaws of modern culture, along with
the attendant narcissism that seems to be inevitable with such types. And it is
this factor- that both men/characters seem to be genuinely interested in each
other’s opinions, that sets them apart from most viewers, and therefore sets
them above, as well, and humans simply detest difference. Superiority is
difference, and that it also means better makes it doubly annoying to most. This
is something that the many Warholian arts films of the 1960s and 1970s, equally
dependent upon talk, could not come close to matching.
The plot of the movie has been recounted many times, so here it is, in
brief: Wally Shawn plays a character much like his real self- a playwright
struggling to get along, and the scion of New York’s elite media. He is the
film’s narrator, and is on his way to have dinner with an old friend of his,
Andre Gregory. Via Shawn’s narration, Gregory is an eccentric producer and
director of theater, who dropped out of sight some years earlier to pursue
esoteric jaunts about the world, in search of himself, in midlife crisis mode,
or some other such banality. While Gregory had helped Shawn’s career early on,
Shawn developed an aversion to him, but via circumstances, felt compelled to
join Gregory for dinner, especially after hearing that Gregory was in sad shape;
having left Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn
Sonata, after hearing Ingrid Bergman utter the line, and was shattered
by this dialogue: ‘I could always live in my art, but not in my life.’
Their meeting
is at a snooty New York restaurant. Yes, it really was a set in Virginia, but
why do almost all the reviews have to insist upon this, since the film clearly
is not set all in real time? In the beginning, there are clear elisions of
things Shawn details, and ther differences between the two men are marked- Shawn
is short, balding, rumpled, unsophisticated, whereas Gregory exudes élan,
charm, and style. He is also the clearly richer of the two men, and knows his
way around the restaurant. Both men are clearly political liberals, although
Shawn leans toward working class humanism and Gregory toward New Age
spirituality. Another point most reviews insist on is a claim both men made that
they were not playing themselves, and if they redid the film they would play
each other’s character. Yet, clearly, in quirks and acting, this would not
work. While they may not be ‘themselves to the 100th percent, they
are themselves to the 97th or 98th percent.
During the first 45 minutes or so, minus the first ten introductory
minutes, Gregory dominates the conversation, speaking on all sorts of topics:
his leaving theater in the mid-1970s; going with Jerzy Grotowski, a famed Polish
theater director, to some forest in Poland to find inner peace by performing
silly rituals, while acquiring the nonsense name Yendrush; a trip to the
Findhorn colony in Scotland; a trip to the Sahara with a Buddhist monk named
Kozan, who subsequently moved in with Gregory’s family; an attempt to do a
dramatize Antoine De Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince; and a
Halloween death ritual on the Long Island estate of photographer Richard Avedon,
amongst others. He also claims to have had supernatural and psychedelic
experiences, such as being at a Christmas Mass and seeing a huge creature
appeared with violets growing out of its eyelids, and poppies growing out of its
toenails. Midway through the film, Shawn starts to reassert his own views-
particularly about the absurd need to go to extreme places just to feel alive,
arguing that the cigar shop opposite the restaurant is just as interesting as
the top of Mount Everest, because reality is fairly uniform (a position I have
always maintained)- the trick to enjoying life is not in the perceived put the
percipient, and as the film heads into its last half hour, he unloads on Gregory
how he really feels of all his friend’s mystical nonsense; about hoe he
understands but does not really understand Gregory’s plight; how he prefers
the comfort of an electric blanket, and how he seeks more comfort, not less. He
then declaims he enjoys reading the autobiography of actor Charlton Heston and
defends rationalism and the scientific method, even if he sometimes reveals that
he, himself, does not quite understand all he pretends to. His best moment comes
in the scene where he questions the validity of fortunes from fortune cookies,
and states that if the message says not to get on a airplane, he’ll pause a
moment, but still get on because the cookie is in no position to know whether or
not the plane trip is doomed.
The two men soon come to the close of their night. Gregory chimes in by
asking who he and Wally are, and his description of the growth of a man reminded
me of one of my own dad’s favorite songs, Sunrise, Sunset, from Fiddler
On The Roof. Shawn then heads home, as Erik Satie’s great Gymnopaedie
#3 plays (in the film it is incorrectly labeled the first Gymnopaedie, but
it is the 3rd, the same tune that recurs in Woody Allen’s 1988
drama Another Woman). He decides to take a cab home, after having taken
the subway to meet Gregory (and what a treat, in an odd way, it is to see the
bad old days of over-graffitied subway cars). He then notices that almost
everywhere he looks in Manhattan he is surrounded by memories of times spent
with family, friends, and lovers. He then heads home and lets us know that when
he got home, he told his girlfriend, Debby, all about his dinner with Andre.
But, as in all great art, it is not necessarily the what that the art
conveys that lends it its greatness, but the how. Despite almost all the
critical focus on what the two friends in the film discuss over eats, it is the
how captured that defines the film. While there are no great masterful
compositions nor daring framings in the film, the very understatedness and
conventionality of the close-ups, and half body shots, and the reaction shots of
both men (often in reflected shots off mirrors), is what forces the reader to
subliminally focus on the words that are stated. And this is where the film does
something truly remarkable, and something no other conversation-based film
(including Melvin Goes To
Dinner, Before Sunrise, Mindwalk; but, interestingly
enough, not Francis Ford Coppola’s The
Conversation) does. In an
interview, I once compared My Dinner With Andre to Chris Marker’s La
Jetee and Bela Tarr’s Satantango,
in terms of its innovatory quality:
Marker’s
film is 99% still photographs with narration, but, in recall, the mind animates
the scenes. Marker thus achieves empathy in a profound manner, by literally
altering the remembered reality in the viewer. Tarr’s film does a similar
thing. This seven hour magnum opus focuses so relentlessly on the tiniest
moments for the longest time that, again, in recall, the mind compresses the
seven hour film into a recalled film of about the same length as a typical new
release. The mind is forced to filter out things, as it does in real life, and
thus we are empathizing with characters in a more ‘real’ sense. Another
remarkable achievement in storytelling, which, after all, all art is about.
There is no such thing as non-narrative nor non-representational art. Those who
claim differently simply are showing their intellectual limits. Finally,
Malle’s film is basically all conversation, yet, again, in recall, there are
scenes the viewer will swear he witnessed- like the ritual burial of Andre in a
Polish forest. I will get the new DVD of this film soon and review it, since
it’s been a decade since I watched it, yet the aforementioned scene, and many
others, are seared into my memory of the film, even though they were never
actually filmed! Like Marker and Tarr, Malle really and truly did something
extraordinary.
Of course, I erred in my claim- it was in Long Island that Gregory was
buried, not the Polish forest, but it’s not my mismemory of details, but the
act of imposed visuals via sheer literary means, that is why the film is so
great, and why it so devastatingly proves my claim that film is essentially
literature with pictures, not pictures with ad hoc narratives strung between
them. In this film, there are any number of scenes that, upon rewatching this
film, visually rocketed back into my mind, as if they were a memory from my own
dim past.
The DVD package, by The Criterion Collection, is solid, but there simply
is no reason that the package needed to be on two disks. Disk One has the film.
That’s it. No audio commentary, although a film like this begs for one. No
theatrical trailer. The only bit of information to impart is that it’s in a
1.66:1 aspect ratio, and the transfer is merely good- there is a bit of touch up
and contrast sharpening (a bit too much graininess at times) that could have
been done, but since the movie is not a visual splendor to begin with, one can
see why Criterion skimped in that department. But skimping on the lack of an
audio commentary is becoming unfortunately too common with Criterion, these
days. Disk Two has only two features, but both are good. There is My Dinner
With Louis, in which Shawn interviews director Malle for the BBC program Arena,
in Atlantic City, in 1981. It runs about an hour, and gives some insight into
Malle’s career in film. The better feature is a more recent pair of interviews
with Shawn and Gregory, conducted by filmmaker Noah Baumbach, which delves a bit
more into the core of the film at hand, although the truth is that Baumbach is a
terrible interviewer- a bit too fawning and mealy-mouthed, and often sputtering
to get the words out of his mouth. Gregory has not aged well, as his mien seems
a welter of age and liver spots, whereas Shawn comes off much more confident
than the character he portrays in the film. They both talk about acting out
chatracters based upon themselves, and this evinces the reality that both men do
a wonderful job in a difficult situation. Credit goes mostly to Shawn for the
bravura screenplay; one of the best in film history. Jeri Sopanen’s
cinematography is what it is- functionary, for the reasons earlier mentioned,
and Akllen Shawn’s and Jean-Claude Laureux’s soundtrack also serves its
purpose well. There is also a booklet that is included, buts its content is
meager- a pair of essays from the published screenplay, by Gregory and Shawn
(having the screenplay, I’ve read it, and wish, instead of merely republishing
it, that there would have been some noting of some of the differences between
the film and that published work. Then there is an essay on the film by film
critic Amy Taubin, but it offers little in the way of anything new. So, overall,
a mild endorsement for the package. While I’m glad the film is back in print,
Criterion really was trying to milk the public with this overpriced package.
Many people, professional and amateur critic alike, have harped on the
fact that Gregory’s character is a hypocrite- he toots his horn about the New
Age way of life, yet he revels in his wealth; but this hypocrisy makes moments,
such as when he wonders why his black doorman called him Mr. Gregory while he
calls the doorman Jimmy, all the more telling. That Gregory and Shawn (whom the
film clearly sympathizes with) have flaws makes them real. The fact that they
are trying to overcome them (even if not succeeding) makes them even more real.
They are at least aware of life. Clearly, many of the film’s critics do not
share that quality, much less the far more rudimentary awareness of the act and
art of fiction. Another critical claim that is often tossed around is that the
film is pseudo-intellectual and takes itself too seriously; but this is a
classic case of bad critics conflating the way certain characters behave, and/or
the messages that they give off, with the message of the film. My Dinner With
Andre is actually a non-preachy film. Its two protagonists are not, but the
camera eye is the real message maker of the film, and its is looking at the two
characters, not empathizing with them.
And, like most great works of art, there is not single message to the
film. It’s almost amusing how people want to both conflate art that they like
with other things, yet also simultaneously reduce it to a bumper sticker. On
certain levels the film is about art and theater, purposiveness and the ability
to not get stuck in rote ways of living. After all, purpose is what makes life
worth living- not love. Without it we would merely be extant beings, and that is
no accomplishment, for even rocks exist, even if they do not have the ability to
know it. Yet, there will always be those who simply lack the ability to get
great art. No, this is not being used as a justification for bad art, but as a
realization that there are simply people who are not intellectually capable of
more than the simplest levels of entertainment. And to those sorts, there is
only one response: fuck you. Go revel in your ignorance and
rationalizations. The film works on many levels, but not on the Lowest Common
Denominator, and praise be to Malle for that. Is the conversation realistic? Yes
and no. There is, save for a few bumps by Shawn, none of the umming and er-ing
that punctuates real time conversation, and there is a sense of time compression
in the conversation, but so what? Even the ‘plain speech’ poetry of William
Carlos Williams was a sham. If one regards his most famous poems (which were his
best) one can see they are anything BUT plain speech. Yet, they effectively
enough convey that illusion so that decades worth of so-called literary and
poetry experts declaim something like that, which is demonstrably false.
Similarly, Shawn’s and Gregory’s conversation is both real and ‘real.’
One would be better off lamenting not that the conversation is too cerebral (for
it isn’t; nor is it stilted)- for the actual words spoken, but lamenting that
so few people even care enough about the topics discussed, in any patois. What
passes, these days, for in depth talk is bloggerese about Obama or Bush or the
idiotic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The sad thing is that three decades ago,
the two stars of the film hoped that their film would spur deeper and more
meaningful discussions amongst an audience they, then, thought verged on
deliteracy; while, looking back, one can see only how far discourse has
plummeted since. This is actually a point Gregory laments in his Disk Two
interview with Baumbach.
Another point to make is that film critic Roger Ebert, upon the film’s 1999
re-release, wrote, ‘Someone asked me the other day if I could
name a movie that was entirely devoid of clichés.’ He then chose My
Dinner With Andre. But many people, especially online, have mistaken what
Ebert meant by that claim. Yes, both the Shawn and Gregory characters are, to a
degree, clichés and stereotypes of liberal New Yorkers (especially liberal
Jewish New Yorkers whose very existence seems permeated with references to the
Holocaust), and both of them utter a few banalities, here and there, but, as
with the claims of preachiness and self-seriousness, this is merely a
conflation. Malle uses two rather stereotypical (and sometimes fatuous)
characters in their rather trite milieu as a jumping off point; as a way to show
the audience that if these two old stereotypes can seek something more, why
aren’t you, the watcher of this film doing so? The seeming clichés, as it
were, are thus undermined, because they are utterances that go 180º against
what they seem to be stating, for there is a dissonance between the
character’s statements and their resultant actions: witness Wally’s cab ride
home to end the film. The rather trite conversation he has had has undermines
the banalities into action. That both men/characters are lacking, not fully
formed, is a plus, because they are therefore relatable. Yet, they also
undermine cliché in a very unique way. When one watches the film, both men
actually look at each other, and often in the eye, when they speak. Even in most
restaurants, most men assume the posture of looking off into the distance (as if
sitting side by side at a sporting event) when they speak, to abstractly conduct their mind’s-eyes. Not these
two.
And this
is just one more reason, out of many, why this film is truly audacious, as well
as great. It exemplifies all that is best about true art, as well as the primacy
of The Word in art, above all other things for, literature is the only art form
based upon a purely human construct. The Word is the most human thing we have in
art- other animals can match our other sensory and physically based arts: mime,
music, acting, mimicry, dance, visual arts, etc. But only literature is all
human,
and it is for this reason, the gift of the screenplay, that film is upraised
beyond the rest of the visual arts. And My Dinner With Andre is the best and
purest example of that gift. Forget what anyone says about this film; including
me. Go watch it. Go see it. Listen to it. Experience it. You will be better for
it.
[An expurgated version of this
article originally appeared on The
Spinning Image website.]
Return to Bylines
