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My Dinner With André (Louis Malle) 1981
* * * 07-04-02 Jeremy Heilman
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Louis Malle’s My Dinner With André has a
well-deserved reputation as the talkiest of all talky movies, and I certainly
won’t dispute it. For nearly two hours, the audience is seated at a table with
stage director André Gregory and actor Wallace Shawn who play themselves as
they meet for dinner for the first time in several years. Some opening narration
provided by Shawn prefaces the evening by saying that he was reticent to meet
André, until a friend reported that he found him sobbing uncontrollably after
seeing Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. Apparently, André responded to the
line, “I could always live in my art, but never in my life.” Much of the
dialogue between the two of them circles around this concept, as the two wax
philosophically about the function of art, the power of personal perception, and
the harmful effects of routine on the creative mind, but an equal amount of time
is spent as André recounts his wild, globe-trotting adventures, where he
traveled from the forests of Poland to the Saharan Dessert in search of himself.
Thankfully, by setting this dialogue at a dinner, some natural narrative
progression emerges. Each course provides temporal nourishment to the audience
and reminds them that the babbling, but entertaining, dialogue won’t continue
endlessly.
Malle’s direction doesn’t do much to spice up the
conversation (He mostly uses a two-shot setup that’s so simple that a shot of
the waiter’s wagging eyebrows becomes a hilarious invention), but I don’t
think that he needs to necessarily. My Dinner depends on the willingness
of the audience to listen to the words being spoken and their ability to conjure
images to go along with the adventures being described. As a result, the film
serendipitously functions similarly to the theater, which is ironic since the
film’s characters spend much of their conversation grappling with the notion
that theater is difficult to create. The movie's great paradox is that they have
created it here despite André’s stated rejection of the form. Of course, the
ability of André to still be affected by art (late into the evening, he quotes
the Bergman film without any irony) shows that his disillusionment is not
absolute. Throughout the bulk of the film, Shawn stays quiet, usually offering
only a “Gosh!” or “Wow!” at the end of André’s monologues. Of course,
he provides a more grounded counter-balance to the eccentricities that André
offers, but I can’t imagine that most viewers would be able to sympathize
wholeheartedly with the simple-minded faux-profundities that he spouts at the
end of the film. They’re meant to be disarming, coming after the heavy
thinking that André’s done, but they’re closer to trite. It doesn’t help
matters that the very film is named My Dinner With André,
and the opening and closing narration is delivered by Shawn, since that
naturally suggests that our sympathies are supposed to be closer to his than
André’s. These mechanisms unfairly stack the hand in his favor in this battle
of dueling philosophies and do a bit to undermine the power that these two have
as perfect foils for each other. Still, most of the film entertains, and it’s
difficult to criticize the experiments of a movie that so boldly disregards most
cinematic convention. Perhaps we are fortunate that My Dinner With André
is such a singular film: in lesser hands it would be torturous.