My Dinner with Andre DVD: Review By brianroche

"My Dinner with Andre" is a movie about two New York intellectuals having dinner. They eat quail. They speak of the theatre, Polish forests, Japanese monks, Scottish mathematicians, and electric blankets. There are no cutaways to the stories they tell, only their faces. At one point one of them says, "I've always considered myself something of a surrealist." No wonder "MDWA" has given the comedy world so much material over the years. It's the sort of movie someone would make if they wanted to make fun of this sort of movie.

But if you look past the parodies (Andy Kaufman's "Breakfast with Blassie", the end of "Waiting for Guffman", "My Dinner with Andre the Giant") you'll find a masterpiece, unique, challenging, and finally very moving. At least I did. But it took me several viewings. The change of heart came when I realized two things:

1) The movie only works if the two guys talking are different from most of the audience;

2) Andre is SUPPOSED to be an *sshole.

The two guys are Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn. They wrote the movie and play versions of themselves.

Shawn is "Wally". He's a playwright, but no one puts on his plays. He tries to supplement his income by acting, but no one casts him.

Andre Gregory plays "Andre". He plays a successful theater director (and is one in real life). He also played John the Baptist in Scorsese's "Last Temptation of Christ".

Most of us do not live in New York, or work in The Theater, or go near theaters unless we're seeing a movie, or travel all over the world. But all of us wonder about the meaning of life in our own way, about how we can achieve our own version of happiness. Watching Wally and Andre discuss the difficulties and joys of life doesn't just get us to identify with them. It gets us to CONFRONT them, and the things they're talking about. Sure, you could have two regular suburban guys hashing out What It All Means over pizza in a sports bar, but I doubt it would have the same impact. Characters closer to you and me relax us too much. This movie needs us on our toes.

They're different from each other too. The movie sets up the contrast between Wally and Andre right away. As we come up from the credits, Wally's trudging through cold New York City streets, hunched against the world. He explains in voiceover that he's heading to dinner with his old friend Andre Gregory. He's pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. Word has it that Andre has been traveling around the world on strange quests.

Andre arrives at the restaurant shortly after Wally, smiling and relaxed. He's dressed in one of those sweaters with the wooden buttons. The tall skinny man gives short Wally a big bear hug, which Wally struggles to return comfortably. They sit down to dinner, with the feeling that Andre already has some kind of advantage over Wally, and they both know it.

Andre's journey, as he relates it to Wally, has been long, strange, and touchy-feely. He went to Poland, where he led a theater group that performed something called a "beehive" - which as he describes it, sounds a lot like the scene in the stadium parking lot before a Grateful Dead show, except no one sells you beads out of the back of their van. He goes to Scotland, where an intellectual collective constructs a building with an untethered roof, which miraculously never blows off. He goes to the Sahara with a Japanese monk, and eats sand, more or less for the hell of it. He goes to India, where he finds "nothing". He sees strange creatures while at mass with his family. As he tells Wally about it, he's intense and enthusiastic.

Wally is visibly uncomfortable at first, but begins to engage in all of Andre's strange stories. He's curious in spite of himself. And for most of the film, he's intrigued, if skeptical, about Andre's strange ideas.

Until Andre challenges his enjoyment of a new electric blanket. Wally likes this new blanket for all the simple comfort it provides him in a harsh, complex world. Andre hates the idea of simple comfort in a world that demands hard-won responses to real complex things: warmth, intimacy, relaxation. This sets up Wally's angry, confused response to all of Andre's crazy travels, and the idea that one would have to travel to gain insight into the world and oneself. Andre counters that we all have to find our own personal top of Mount Everest to be shocked into knowing ourselves better - which leads us to a greater understanding of the world.

The film is full of nice little grace notes. Wally pauses before entering the restaurant to slip on a pre-tied necktie. Before they sit down to dinner, Andre asks that the floral centerpiece be taken away. There's a great moment after the waiter stops at the table when he glances at Andre, and Andre fixes his gaze at the waiter, almost daring him to say something about the conversation.

Their waiter, played by Jean Lenauer, is vital to the flow of the film. He looks French and mean, like he's suffered overhearing the tiresome dinner conversation of many Wallys and Andres. He bears witness to their ongoing conversation as he brings them their courses, with sidelong glances and blank stares held for long moments.

As I said before, Andre is an *sshole. He monopolizes the conversation and relishes an argument. He even makes several comparisons of his own life to Nazi Germany. He wonders if he should be caught and tried like a war criminal, for carrying on as if the normal rules of life did not apply to him. He approvingly quotes a man he's met, who tells him New York City is a new model concentration camp, where the inmates are the guards. Funny, but at the end of the film, you don't get the impression that Andre is going to turn himself in. And my guess is, while New York has hundreds if not thousands of 24-hour Chinese take-out joints, it has not a single gas chamber.

But Wally's response to Andre must mirror our own response to the movie. An experience that alters your outlook on the world can't be a cakewalk. The best man at your wedding, I would argue, can't inspire you to the kind of epiphany Wally has as he sits in his cab, waiting to get home and tell his girlfriend all about his dinner with Andre.

Here we've got nothing, unless you count cast bios. If and when this is re-issued, I can think of no finer extra than a commentary with Shawn and Gregory, looking back at their unique movie, which has inspired (and to be fair, angered) so many. But for now this movie speaks just fine for itself without extra material.

The movie is presented in 1:33. It's pretty scratchy and could use some clean up. Though I wonder how good it looked in 1981. Until it gets a digital scrubbing, this small movie looks as good as Louis Malle could intend it to look.

A lot of filmmakers, faced with shooting a movie consisting of one long conversation between two people, might either lock the camera down for long takes to watch the conversation, or liven it up with lots of quick cuts. If director Louis Malle suffered any indecision over camera choices, it doesn't show. His subtle camera moves and cuts move the conversation along without it ever feeling static.

The sound here is fine. I especially enjoy the use of Erik Satie's music over the ending, summing up Wally's feelings and our own.

"My Dinner with Andre" is about the power of connection with another person to change us. If you let down your guard long enough to hear what Andre and Wally are really saying, you'll feel changed yourself.