Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #321785 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

Andre still absorbing
Recently I made a resolution to own and review more Criterion editions of films and I've made plans to purchase one a month. This month's is Louis Malle's "My Dinner with Andre", though attributing it as the property of its director would do a great disservice to screenwriters Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, who also play the film's main characters. It had been a few years since I'd seen it, and while it unfolds in a simple and unforgettable format - two men sit in a restaurant and talk - I had forgotten exactly what about their discussions had made it such a fascinating oddity in the back of my mind.

The film opens with shots of Wally traveling across New York City to meet Andre for dinner. Wally is a meek and nervous playwright who spends his days performing the errands of the playwright who hasn't yet had a success. He has a girlfriend and worries about paying his bills. Andre is a former colleague and close friend of Wally's. Once a successful theater director, Andre all but disappeared from the country and the two haven't seen each other for years. Stories have been circulating about Andre's recent strange behaviour and emotional instability. A friend insists that Wally meet with Andre, who was discovered weeping against a wall after viewing an Ingmar Bergman movie. "He had been seized by a fit of ungovernable crying," Wally explains, "when the character played by Ingrid Bergman had said, 'I could always live in my art, but never in my life.'"

Andre appears excited and refreshed as the two men sit down to dinner in a fancy restaurant. After pleasantries are exchanged, he begins to tell Wally stories about his travels to Tibet, northern Scotland and the Sahara, relating his strange experiences abroad while Wally sits in awe, never quite knowing what to add. Indeed, for the first half of the film, Wally sits nearly silent, offering only small bits of insight and trivia that cannot possibly be latched to Andre's wild tales of being buried alive and traveling with 40 non-English speaking Polish thespians into a forest as an exercise to rediscover his interest in the theater.

Eventually, however, the crux of the conversation comes about and the playing field is evened. Andre has been desperately trying to figuratively wake himself up from what he views as a life of tedium and mechanical action. Wally opens up more and more as they discuss themes of loneliness, love, art, existentialism and what it means to live a worthwhile life. The conversation flows eloquently and the men seem to always be dancing close to a series of great discoveries before they move on to new territory. Small, humourous bits of irony are injected when the waiter approaches at certain moments. The conversation feels free-flowing, but there is a precise attention to detail that envelopes its audience.

What makes the conversation especially fascinating are the obvious character differences, both in their physical appearances and their thoughts on existence. Wally enjoys his comfortable life. He likes a cold cup of coffee ready to sip when he wakes up in the morning. He enjoys his electric blanket and reading the autobiography of Charlton Heston. Andre believes that humanity is becoming too attached to its comforts and that they are becoming pushovers politically as a result. As his arguments bring Wally out of his shell, we admire Wally for his honesty and simple way of expressing himself, while Andre's observations continue to amaze.

Andre's stories put the film on the level of many an action blockbuster. His dialogue is delivered with the focus and attention to detail of a storyteller that has an entire room hanging on his every word. Images of his descriptions leap to the mind and build an impression of Andre's world better than special effects ever could because they are presented with the passionate belief of a man who has just found religion. The film's screenplay was pieced together by the men based on conversations the two shared in life and recorded. Beginning with a 1,500 page script, the film was carefully pared down to its essential themes by Shawn, Gregory and Malle.

"My Dinner with Andre" is as current in its exploration of human connection today as it was 30 years ago, and that's a scary fact to admit. So many of us get older and find it nerve-wracking or even a waste of time to sit down with another person and have an honest and direct conversation about how we are living our lives, more than likely because we're afraid we're not getting it right. Life is the most fascinating and most important topic of conversation there is.

Perhaps we are afraid of talking about life because it is inevitably entangled with the subject of death. The modest Wally observes: "If I understood it correctly, I think Heidegger said that if you were to experience your own being to the full, you would be experiencing the decay of that being toward death as part of your experience." If we are able to live only in art, our guaranteed fate in life will take us by surprise, slowly and tragically. There is no shame in trying to understand it.

Tres Bon!
"My Dinner with Andre" is my all-time favorite film. I watch this movie often, each time of which I notice another layer of meaning. In addition to the superior dialogue and direction in this film (which other reviewers here have aptly described), the movie is rich, visually. This movie is not visually boring, despite the fact the cameras are on Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory for nearly two hours. Andre Gregory, especially, is such an engaging conversationalist that he evokes compelling mental images in the audience as to what these far away places might look like (i.e., the Sahara and the Polish forest to name a few). After all, Gregory said "I consider myself a bit of a Surrealist," meaning that the world of dream images in the mind's eye are the locus of true imagination. It's a superb use of the verbal to evoke the visual. Yes, the film is overtly naturalistic (i.e., the restaurant setting, a 2-hour meal with "real" characters), but the sheer dialogue transports one beyond mere verisimilitude.

Having the audience imagine, in their own ways, what these venues might look like is so contrary to what we get so often in American movies today. We typically get in your-face visuals and glitzy special effects (e.g., "Lord of the Rings) that allows no room for viewer imagination: its all artificially provided for you. Such films leave me, to use Gregory's words, "passive and impotent."

"My Dinner with Andre" respects its audience by reminding us what it is to be truly human. Having conversations as portrayed in this film is my ideal evening out with a good friend(s).

I can't recommend this movie enough.

A masterpiece! - The best movie of the past 25 years
I just finished this movie, and I feel like I need to simply get a few thoughts down before my head hits my pillow. I didn't know what to expect entering My Dinner With Andre - after all, it is a movie about two guys who have dinner in a restaurant and talk the whole time. But from the moment that the goofy-looking, awkward Wallace Shawn lumbers down a New York street and we hear his voice-over, I knew that something more was taking place in this movie. What it was, I had no idea.

There are no character names; there is no 'plot;' Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, both prominent actors/playwrights of New York, meet after not having seen each other for years and they shoot the breeze. I learned that it's not as extemporaneous as I originally had imagined - Shawn and Gregory got together, recorded hours of their conversations, and then compiled a script based on them. The 'restaurant' is actually a defunct hotel, the waiters and barkeepers all actors. But there's a transcendence to it all, as the men sit and chat (mostly the powerful, lively Andre Gregory doing the talking), food being brought out to them.

What heightens the power of the film is the setup that Wallace gives in the voice-over before their dinner: Andre, the man he meets, has been living a peculiar existence traveling all over the world, when he used to never want to leave his family. A friend of Wallace's saw Andre weeks before sobbing uncontrollably on the street because he was violently moved by a line in Bergman's Autumn Sonata. Like Wallace, we don't know what to expect in the very context of the dinner conversation.

Some of the things that Andre and Wallace discuss in this movie are so unimaginably crazy, so hauntingly horrific, that even the mental images that went through my head sent chills all the way through me. At one point, Andre tells of a strange rite with some friends on Halloween in which some of them let him through a strange process of being stripped completely naked, bathed, led through a field, lowered into a grave and buried alive for half an hour. Of course, I tell you this just to tantalize you, because to begin to even summarize what goes on in 110 perfect minutes would be impossible. Andre and Wallace discuss love, marriage, perception and reality, theology, and even the validity of their very statements. That they relate it with such grace and raw, real emotion makes me refuse to believe that this was staged in any way. It feels so natural.

I can't believe that something like this could actually make its way onto film, because it's such an amazing achievement for the art itself - in a way (especially in an early story that Andre tells about the nature of performance), seeing these men talk over dinner on film is the actual embodiment of a movie folding into itself in perpetuity. These men are real figures, play real figures in the film, recreate real conversations, and talk about reality in such a way that a heightened sense of awareness pervades the whole film. I didn't get up once, check the time - a few times I leaned closer to the screen because what was being said struck so close to me, hit home so hard, that I wanted to just be nearer to it. At one point, I gasped as Andre related the idea of New York, of working society being a new kind of concentration camp in which the prisoners make the prison, abide by the rules, and don't even realize it's holding them in. Whether I believe that or not is irrelevant - the fact that it's worked into a conversation like this is amazing.

The movie moves with grace between moments of hauntingly dark realizations, to soaring epiphanies of happiness and then back again. Much of the film may be discussion about the zombie-like nature of human existence, but there is a certain empowering quality to it all. My Dinner With Andre is not just about a conversation; it is about living; it is about life; it is about reality; it is about love; but most of all it is about the fact that we can all be happy with what we have right now, even with the infinite, scary knowledge that we receive over time. We meet a man who personnifies 'normalcy' with every gesture (Wallace), and yet there's a man who has done everything in his power to resist stasis (Andre). I left the movie with a changed perspective on each man, which I'm sure is what happened between them, too. More than a few times, I felt on the verge of tears watching this, and I felt it more than ever when Erik Satie's "Gymnopedie for Piano" began at the film's conclusion. One of the most transcendent works of music was chosen for one of the most transcendently great films I've ever seen. How cool.

I'm sorry. I'm just rambling at 2:15am, but I just thought it was impossible to not attempt to put into words what could be one of the single most important experiences I've ever had with a movie. I've seen a handful of movies that have drastically changed my thinking about a certain theme or notion. My Dinner With Andre might have just changed my life.