In the three decades since its release, My Dinner with Andre has gained a reputation as a poster child of boring and pretentious art films. As its title indicates, it consists of nothing more than two people sitting down for dinner and having a conversation for two hours. Andre Gregory and Shawn Wallace play characters who appear to be thinly veiled versions of themselves. Having not seen each other for a number of years, Shawn is surprised to receive a dinner invitation from Andre and reluctantly agrees. Andre then proceeds to regale him with stories of the adventures he has had over the past five years.
The conversation is fascinating, lively and feels both spontaneous and natural. Both actors are amazing with Gregory in particular being a fantastic storyteller. The camera may be showing nothing but two people sitting in a fancy restaurant, but the very staticness of the images encourage us to visualize the stories in our mind’s eye, bringing them to life in our own imagination. The sparseness of the elements in play here hide the fact that the script is apparently distilled from hundreds of hours of real conversations and that filming took place over the course of two weeks. The presentation may be minimalistic but there is a lot of craft at work here.
The first half of the film is dominated by what may as well be a monologue by Andre, with Shawn interjecting only rarely with expressions of interest or surprise. To be perfectly honest, as eloquent as Gregory is, I started getting tired, irritated and even bored towards the tail end of the first hour. Part of it is that as entertaining as his stories are, they all share a common theme and once you understand what is going on, hearing more variations on the same theme starts to grate. But mainly I have a personal aversion to existentialist diatribes of this nature and was frustrated by my inability to interrupt and offer rebuttals.
Eventually however Shawn seems to become irritated enough to respond and the back and forth here becomes much more interesting to me. Shawn actually represents the audience’s point of view in this film since we begin and end with his thoughts so in a way he is speaking for the audience in expressing his incredulity and his preference for a more down-to-earth attitude towards life. Still I am irked that though the conversation ends with no definite conclusion, it is the better dressed, more charismatic, better looking and richer Andre who seems to walk away with the upper hand.
One thought that struck me as I was watching is that even while having their conversation, they’re doing exactly the things that they say are wrong. They eat the expensive food that is brought to them without seeming to taste it, which is of course lamp-shaded explicitly here, or even acknowledging its arrival on their table. Similarly the way the waiter fades into the background for them, while the camera very much acknowledges his presence, is exactly what Andre states is wrong about his relationship with his building’s doorman. And of course, they go on and on about how people find it impossible to communicate directly with one another and see people as they truly are, yet they never get around to talking about how Andre is obviously financially secure enough to go do whatever strikes his fancy whenever he likes while Shawn seems to be having problems just making ends meet and very obviously can’t afford this meal they’re having. Andre doesn’t even bother to ask Shawn about how life has been treating him. Are they really friends or is the narcissistic Andre just taking advantage of a captive audience to talk about his adventures?
Anyway these are just a few examples out of many of the ideas and thoughts that are covered in this film. I could easily imagine hundreds of pages of analysis being written, such is its richness. That alone makes this a film well worth watching.