My Dinner With Andre (1981)

This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:

Comment: I don’t understand why you don’t have more subscribers. What are people doing?
Dusty: They’ve built their own prison, so they exist in a state of schizophrenia. They’re both guards and prisoners and as a result they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made, or to even see it as a prison.

Rating: PG
Director: Louis Malle
Writers: Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory
Stars: Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory
Release Date: October 11, 1981 (United States)
Run time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

THE PLOT:

via wiki

Struggling playwright Wally dreads having dinner with his old friend Andre, whom he has been avoiding since Andre gave up his career as a theater director in 1975 and embarked on an extended spiritual midlife crisis including: synchronicity, eastern spirituality, near-death experience and utopian communes.

In a fancy New York restaurant, Andre tells Wally about some of the adventures he has had since they last saw each other, which include working with his mentor, the director Jerzy Grotowski, and a group of Polish actors in a forest in Poland, traveling to the Sahara to try to create a play based on The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry, and visiting Findhorn in Scotland. The last in this string of events was when Andre and a small group of friends arranged Halloween-themed experiences for each other, and one piece consisted of the participants being briefly buried alive.

While Andre says he needed to do all of these things to get out of the rut he was in and learn how to be human, Wally argues that living as Andre has done for the past several years is simply not possible for most people, and he describes how he finds pleasure in more ordinary things, like a cup of coffee or his new electric blanket. Andre asserts that focusing too much on comfort can be dangerous, and says that what passes for normal life in New York in the late 1970s is more akin to living in a dream than living in reality. While Wally agrees with many of Andre’s criticisms of modern society, he takes issue with the more mystical aspects of Andre’s stories, as he has a rational and scientific worldview.

After all of the other customers have already left the restaurant, the friends, each having expressed themselves openly and feeling heard by the other, part on good terms. Since Andre paid for dinner, Wally treats himself to a taxi ride, and he notices feeling a deep connection to all of the familiar places he passes on the way home. He narrates that, when he sees his girlfriend, he tells her all about his dinner with Andre.

My Review:

My first introduction to this movie was a spoof / homage of it done by the television show, Community. Abed nearly enticed me into seeing it, but I never went through with it. Over the last few years, I have been encountering clips from the film, shared on social media, related to conspiracy theories and the idea of people sleep-walking through a modern world that is kind of an Orwellian nightmare. That obviously appealed to me, too, such that I knew it was only a matter of time until I viewed it. Finally though, the streaming app recommended it to me and with the help of extreme convenience (I started the movie with no intentional searching for it, and the push of two buttons) I decided to watch it. I guess I was living out the sleep-walking discussing from the film. Anyway, it is too early to say for sure, but it might now be my new favorite film. I finally got to experience what it might be like for other people to have a dinner conversation with myself. Bless the filmmakers for that. I am definitely three parts Andre and one part Wallace and those deep conversations are nearly all that I know how to do.

The entire film is a single dinner conversation between Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, wherein they eat dinner and discuss Andre’s bizarre recent life experiences, the theater writing world they both have lived in, and ultimately their respective views on present-day society and what it means to be human and alive. Andre has become increasingly spiritual in recent years, now viewing the world as an Orwellian nightmare of people who neither really see each other nor know themselves. Wallace agrees strongly with Andre in some regards, but also finds himself defending modern life, too.

The movie is knowingly self-serious (I definitely would have made fun of this movie for most of my life), but it works for me now, for a few reasons. First, the conversation starts with a series of wildly bizarre and funny recent life experiences shared by Andre, with Wallace politely nodding along. This works for the audience inasmuch as it keeps us interested in the discussion, until we can become invested in it. Second, the screenplay does a good job of returning the conversation to a relatable philosophical footing in tandem with Wallace finally being drawn into the discussion. By the end, as an audience member, I felt as though I knew both men relatively well, and cared about the conversation. Who doesn’t love a good “what does it all mean?” discussion with a good friend? In a sense, the dinner conversation and the movie addressed, and provided, an answer for the more abstract ideas the two men were discussing. Open and deep communication helped both men to feel alive in a deeper way. As Wallace narrates about his taxi ride home, the characters and the audience leave the film’s dinner scene in a contemplative mood, appreciative of, and awake to, all the life that surrounds us.

Here’s a fairly well-traveled clip from the movie to give you an idea of its tone.

If you know what you’re in for (namely that the entire movie will happen between two people merely talking at a table), I definitely recommend this film. It’s thought-provoking and entertaining.

Have you seen My Dinner With Andre? If so, what did you think?