My Dinner with Andre

A modest independent movie consisting solely of a dinner conversation between two artist/intellectuals who most people outside of the New York theater world had never even heard of, My Dinner With Andre is one of the most unlikely success stories of American cinema. This rarified exercise on a tiny budget became an indie hit and an arthouse success story and entered the cultural lexicon in (one of the funniest references to the film is in the mockumentary Waiting For Guffman, where they have been turned into action figures that you can use to stage your own conversations). Audiences were captivated and critics enthusiastic of this eccentric meeting of minds. As Gregory remarked years later, looking back on the film, "Words are hugely powerful and that's been forgotten, especially in the movies." It's a fiction based on autobiography, with theater director Andre Gregory and playwright (and sometime actor) Wallace Shawn portraying fictionalized versions of themselves, named Andre and Wally, in a staged conversation shot on the elaborate set of an expensive (but imaginary) restaurant in the manner of a documentary by French director Louis Malle. Once close friends and colleagues, Andre had essentially dropped out of theater to travel the world seeking spiritual enlightenment. Wally, initially wary of the reunion, reluctantly agrees to meet Andre for dinner at an elegant restaurant of Andre's choosing (the head waiter doesn't quite hide his disapproval of Wally's rumpled wardrobe). Wally asks Andre to describe his recent adventures and bohemian experiences. Andre launches into stories of a theater retreat in a Polish forest (when he returned, he confesses, "Most people I met thought something was wrong with me"), his time with philosophers and physicists at Findhorn in Scotland, and a traumatic ritual of symbolic death and resurrection staged as an elaborate piece of theater. It's almost a monologue, with Wally reduced to "What happened next?" and non-committal affirmations, until the second act of this dinner theater comes around (with the serving of the main course) to Andre's disillusionment with his life and the culture of his world. Wally, initially more curious than involved, begins to engage Andre in small ways and, in the final act (coffee and an after-dinner drink), asks: "Do you want to hear my response to all of this?" It's at once awesome and unreal. Gregory really did travel as a spiritual pilgrim seeking meaning in life and he recounts his tales with the dynamic intensity of a performing storyteller. His stories and philosophical musings can be compelling if you let yourself get carried away by Gregory's passion, which is as genuine (if exaggerated for the film; Gregory credits Malle with bringing out a somewhat manic quality) as his adventures. But there's also an element of the pretentious New York dilettante who escapes the yoke of work to indulge in the travel and cultural wanderlust out of the reach of the rest of us. Wally, meanwhile, is skeptical of the spiritual odyssey and defensive of his own modest experiences and his way of life. Perhaps he takes Andre's critique of the modern life as an empty existence a personal criticism. Perhaps it's a competitive streak that compels him to intellectually wrestle with Andre. The dialogue comes out of conversations between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn. As Shawn explains in the introduction, they had previously worked together in the theater. After Shawn heard a couple of Gregory's stories at various social functions ("I had the need to tell my story," Gregory explains), Shawn approached him about collaborating on a screenplay made up solely of a dialogue between them. They tape-recorded a series of conversations, which Shawn transcribed and edited down into fictionalized, structured theatrical dialogue. Shawn contends that the screenplay was meant to be funny, a satire of bourgeois men being pretentious. Gregory gives credit to Shawn for the "poetry of the script" and Shawn gives credit to director Louis Malle, who read the script when Shawn was cast in a small role in Atlantic City, for bringing a warmth to the film and an affection for the characters and their friendship. Malle had undertaken his own spiritual odyssey year before, when he traveled to India to present some of his films and stayed to film his way through the country in a project that became the epic documentary Phantom India. The subject matter intrigued him, and the challenge of making a conversation cinematic compelled him. Malle spent months with the actors in rehearsal, teaching the theater-trained Gregory the fundamentals of screen acting, honing the characters and pruning the script with Shawn (from three hours down to two) in the process, and then shot the film over the course of two weeks in a set constructed in the shuttered ballroom of a grand hotel in Richmond, Virginia. With no action speak of, Malle paces the film with the rhythm of the conversation, his restrained cutting limited to various two-shots, over-shoulder shots and close-ups of faces, with a periodic pan or short tracking shot around the table for variety. It's so unobtrusive it's barely noticeable; he edits to the conversation, to the drama of the story, the energy of the performer and the dynamic of the conversation. The waiter (Jean Lenauer, whose hangdog face is a marvelous presence) makes more of an impression as he periodically enters their exclusive bubble to serve meals and drinks, timed to the end of a conversation, a shift in tone or a stray comment to which he almost imperceptibly may raise an eyebrow by way of comment (much more subtle than rolling his eyes). The result is an intellectual bull session as cinematic performance piece, a dynamic dinner conversation between active artists who have known each other long enough to let down a few defenses and let loose some wild ideas and confessions. It is also the pretentious proclamations and justifications of two privileged men who can afford a meal at an upscale New York eatery, batting around the meaning of life while working folk, more noticed by the audience than the characters themselves, modestly wait on them and then wait for them to finish: Andre and Wally are the last left in the restaurant at closing time. The dynamism of the film lies in the tension between these two poles – the passion of their positions and the abstraction of their dialogue, our ability to identify with them and our dislocation from their rarified position of Upper East Side New York artist/intellectuals – while the pleasures are in the company, the ideas and the intrigue of the conversation itself. Criterion releases the film on a two-disc special edition. The film was shot on 16mm film and the high-definition digital transfer, mastered from the original negative, preserves the coarse photographic grain of the original film as well as the distinctive warmth of the color. The original mono soundtrack is preserved in the remastering. The second disc features the 52-minute "My Dinner With Louis," a 1982 episode of British arts documentary series "Arena" that surveys the career of Louis Malle via a restaurant conversation between Wallace Shawn (again playing the role of the prompter) and Malle, and new interviews with Gregory and Shawn, interviewed individually by filmmaker/friend Noah Baumbach. Each of the new interviews, which run about a half hour apiece, revisit the origins of the script, the development of the project and their reflections on the film itself as a piece of staged fiction. Both have a lot to say about the caricatures of themselves in the film and look back on it as a kind of self-critique. "Wally is hiding behind silence and Andre is hiding behind words," observes Gregory, while Shawn remarks: "What is not said [in the film] is we're two upper-class guys talking about life while other people are working." You can see the roots of the film characters in the real people, but it's clear from these interviews that they are also quite different from their onscreen namesakes. These are artists who crafted a fiction to comment on life. Also feature a booklet with a new essay by critic Amy Taubin and reprints of the short essays by Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn originally included in the published screenplay of the film. For more information about My Dinner With Andre, visit The Criterion Collection. To order My Dinner With Andre, go to TCM Shopping. by Sean Axmaker