Sean Burns
With the possible exception of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the most exciting film released in 1981 was about two men having dinner. A continents-spanning epic set almost entirely within a stuffy restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, director Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre has been referenced, parodied and satirized so often it’s become part of our shared pop cultural fabric – one of those movies people know all about even if they’ve never seen it. Yet the film has never really been imitated, because how could you even try? It’s entirely sui generis, the craziest idea for a movie you’ve ever heard, and the unlikeliest sleeper hit of all time.
Dryly synopsized: it’s the story of two unknown theatre people arguing over a meal. Struggling avant garde playwright Wallace “Wally” Shawn warily accepts a dinner invitation from his old friend and colleague Andre Gregory, a former stage world superstar director who back in the early ‘70s discovered and championed Wally’s early work. The two friends haven’t seen each other in some time. Gregory apparently had some sort of emotional breakdown and dropped out of New York society, disappearing on a five-year sojourn to far-flung lands on a vision quest to find answers about the meaning of existence.
The struggling Shawn has more pragmatic concerns—like paying the bills, which his girlfriend Debbie is working as a waitress to do at the moment. The son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, Wally fondly recalls a childhood of comfort and ease during which all he thought about was art and literature. Riding in a spectacularly graffiti-strewn subway car on his way to dinner, Shawn’s voice-over provides what’s probably the film’s most quoted line: “Now I’m 36, and all I think about is money.”
The two men catch up in one of those fancy French restaurants that could only exist in certain neighborhoods of New York City. It’s a liminal space populated by old money oddballs and a waitstaff of lifers who might as well be from Mars. Wally is wary at first, but Gregory is overjoyed to see his old friend. He’s bursting at the seams with wild tales of Tibetan monks and frolicking with fauns in primeval forests. Gregory speaks quickly, with the rapt intensity of a New Age guru and the polished delivery of a classically trained impresario. The stories are so vivid we can watch them unfold in our heads, like a radio play or theatre of the mind. For the first few reels, it seems like My Dinner With Andre might be a monologue, and then Wally finally decides he’s heard enough and starts talking back.
Shawn’s classically nebbishy appearance was one of the great sight gags in Woody Allen’s Manhattan two years earlier. Diane Keaton spends the movie speaking in hushed reverence of a former lover she never got over, a dynamo in bed who “really opened me up sexually,” and when we finally meet him, it’s Wallace Shawn. Looking at the guy, it’s impossible not to love him, and the version of himself Shawn plays in My Dinner With Andre is a man grateful for life’s simple pleasures. He argues that he doesn’t need to climb Mount Everest, he’d rather enjoy a nice cup of coffee and read The New York Times. Wally’s idea of a miracle is his electric blanket.
To Gregory – or, at least, to the version of himself he’s playing in the movie – such creature comforts are part of a con, lulling the modern world into thoughtless complacency. But then again, he can afford to think that way. One of the marvelous things about the movie is that it doesn’t take sides in their philosophical debate, nor does it ask us to. There’s no rancor here, nor any of the distemper that makes modern discourse such a nightmare. It’s a genuinely thoughtful exchange of ideas between two old friends who have great affection for one another. Both finish the movie feeling appreciated and heard.
Louis Malle made more great films than most great filmmakers, but you never see his name on lists of legendary auteurs, probably because his style was so unrecognizable from movie to movie. My Dinner With Andre was Malle’s follow up to the wistful 1980 crime classic Atlantic City, and the two films have nothing in common except their excellence. Malle always served his material with a fastidious craftsmanship that gave the illusion of effortlessness. Indeed, every aspect of this picture about two guys talking was meticulously worked out in advance. (Had it just been extemporaneous bullshitting, the movie would have been The Joe Rogan Experience with smaller guys and bigger words.)
Shawn and Gregory borrowed an office at New York University and spent three months recording their conversations, emerging with a transcript that ran some 1,500 pages. Shawn then spent a year distilling it down to a three-hour screenplay, which director Malle cut another hour out of when he came aboard. Shawn claims that his original script was much colder and more overtly satirical, but the director’s affinity for he and Gregory as people colored the final product. This warmth might be why My Dinner With Andre has become a comfort movie for so many. It’s such an enjoyable picture to revisit every few years because you really like spending time with these guys. Whenever I watch it again, it feels like I’m catching up with old friends.
That restaurant that seems like it could only exist in New York City didn’t actually exist and wasn’t in New York City at all. My Dinner With Andre was shot in an abandoned hotel in Richmond, Virginia. The waiter, Jean Lenauer, was a Viennese WWII refugee working as a film archivist at the Museum of Modern Art who had been recommended to Malle by photographer Richard Avedon because he had such a memorable face. (It wasn’t until the cameras started rolling that they realized he had no idea how to wait tables.) The old building no longer had a functioning HVAC system, so the winter shoot was warmed by space heaters. The actors wore long johns, and upon Gregory’s lap throughout the filming, irony of ironies, was an electric blanket.
The film faltered in its first week of release, but soon found two high profile champions in critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Why a movie about two not-particularly-photogenic dudes arguing for two hours would appeal to these gentlemen will perhaps always be a mystery, but their tireless promotion of the picture kickstarted a word-of-mouth phenomenon that kept My Dinner With Andre in theaters for more than a year. They’re how I first heard of the film. For this young viewer, Sneak Previews was a gateway to an intriguingly adult world where smart-sounding grown-ups watched grown-up films and spoke about them intelligently afterwards. It was my first glimpse of a cinema beyond Disney cartoons and Star Wars, where sophisticated adults went to see movies about people eating supper.
Treating himself to a cab ride home, Wally looks out the window and realizes that he’s looking at the world a little differently after his dinner with Andre. You may find yourself doing the same.
“My Dinner with Andre” is streaming on the Criterion Channel and Max.
