[.ca] My Dinner with Andre: A Screenplay (ISBN 0802130631)

A masterpiece! - The best movie of the past 25 years:
I just finished this movie, and I feel like I need to simply get a few thoughts down before my head hits my pillow. I didn't know what to expect entering My Dinner With Andre - after all, it is a movie about two guys who have dinner in a restaurant and talk the whole time. But from the moment that the goofy-looking, awkward Wallace Shawn lumbers down a New York street and we hear his voice-over, I knew that something more was taking place in this movie. What it was, I had no idea. There are no character names; there is no 'plot;' Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, both prominent actors/playwrights of New York, meet after not having seen each other for years and they shoot the breeze. I learned that it's not as extemporaneous as I originally had imagined - Shawn and Gregory got together, recorded hours of their conversations, and then compiled a script based on them. The 'restaurant' is actually a defunct hotel, the waiters and barkeepers all actors. But there's a transcendence to it all, as the men sit and chat (mostly the powerful, lively Andre Gregory doing the talking), food being brought out to them. What heightens the power of the film is the setup that Wallace gives in the voice-over before their dinner: Andre, the man he meets, has been living a peculiar existence traveling all over the world, when he used to never want to leave his family. A friend of Wallace's saw Andre weeks before sobbing uncontrollably on the street because he was violently moved by a line in Bergman's Autumn Sonata. Like Wallace, we don't know what to expect in the very context of the dinner conversation. Some of the things that Andre and Wallace discuss in this movie are so unimaginably crazy, so hauntingly horrific, that even the mental images that went through my head sent chills all the way through me. At one point, Andre tells of a strange rite with some friends on Halloween in which some of them let him through a strange process of being stripped completely naked, bathed, led through a field, lowered into a grave and buried alive for half an hour. Of course, I tell you this just to tantalize you, because to begin to even summarize what goes on in 110 perfect minutes would be impossible. Andre and Wallace discuss love, marriage, perception and reality, theology, and even the validity of their very statements. That they relate it with such grace and raw, real emotion makes me refuse to believe that this was staged in any way. It feels so natural. I can't believe that something like this could actually make its way onto film, because it's such an amazing achievement for the art itself - in a way (especially in an early story that Andre tells about the nature of performance), seeing these men talk over dinner on film is the actual embodiment of a movie folding into itself in perpetuity. These men are real figures, play real figures in the film, recreate real conversations, and talk about reality in such a way that a heightened sense of awareness pervades the whole film. I didn't get up once, check the time - a few times I leaned closer to the screen because what was being said struck so close to me, hit home so hard, that I wanted to just be nearer to it. At one point, I gasped as Andre related the idea of New York, of working society being a new kind of concentration camp in which the prisoners make the prison, abide by the rules, and don't even realize it's holding them in. Whether I believe that or not is irrelevant - the fact that it's worked into a conversation like this is amazing. The movie moves with grace between moments of hauntingly dark realizations, to soaring epiphanies of happiness and then back again. Much of the film may be discussion about the zombie-like nature of human existence, but there is a certain empowering quality to it all. My Dinner With Andre is not just about a conversation; it is about living; it is about life; it is about reality; it is about love; but most of all it is about the fact that we can all be happy with what we have right now, even with the infinite, scary knowledge that we receive over time. We meet a man who personnifies 'normalcy' with every gesture (Wallace), and yet there's a man who has done everything in his power to resist stasis (Andre). I left the movie with a changed perspective on each man, which I'm sure is what happened between them, too. More than a few times, I felt on the verge of tears watching this, and I felt it more than ever when Erik Satie's "Gymnopedie for Piano" began at the film's conclusion. One of the most transcendent works of music was chosen for one of the most transcendently great films I've ever seen. How cool. I'm sorry. I'm just rambling at 2:15am, but I just thought it was impossible to not attempt to put into words what could be one of the single most important experiences I've ever had with a movie. I've seen a handful of movies that have drastically changed my thinking about a certain theme or notion. My Dinner With Andre might have just changed my life.

I want to have a conversation like this:
I have not seen this DVD so my review pertains only to the movie itself. This is one of my favorite films of all time. I can watch it over and over again and it remains enjoyable. The entire movie consists of two old friends having a conversation over dinner. Wallace Shawn plays Wallace Shawn, a struggling playwrite who acts to pay his bills. He is a realist, but he has an unshakable faith in the power and importance of art. Andre Gregory plays Andre Gregory, a once successful director who had worked with Shawn in the past, but who has since had an apparent breakdown. Shawn has heard rumors about his old friend's erratic behavior. Shawn is wary of the dinner. How crazy is Andre? Why does he want to meet after all of these years. He gently prods Andre with some general questions, but once he gets Andre started, there is no stopping him. He had had a breakdown - or a crisis, or an epiphany depending on how one looks at it. Andre had realized that he was not really living, but, rather, sort of existing in a semi-consious state. He looked around and saw that everyone was doing the same thing. He also lost his faith in the ability of art to communicate anything. This crisis is the result of his reaction to post-modernity in general. He proceeds to tell Wallace the extremes to which he went to try to feel like he was really experiencing life again. He traveled all over the world, experimented with all sorts of mysticism and unconventional thought, and developed a conscious, almost child-like view of the world. I will not paraphrase the entire conversation. Wallace Shawn does get his rebuttal, and it steers the conversation in a cryptic direction. The conclusion, or lack thereof, of the argument is challenging, if not down-right depressing. This aspect of the film is rarely mentioned. Although Shawn leaves exhilarated by the conversation he has had, that conversation has left the audience in a quandry. The movie should instigate some interesting conversations of your own. The script is just wonderfull. The two men taped many of their conversations and then edited them up and made a script out of it. Great idea that I am surprised is not used more often. The result is complete naturalism. Malle is reserved and delicate in his direction. A must for anyone who likes intelligent cinema - or simply craves a good conversation. Have that conversation vicariously through this splendid film.

Tres Bon!:
"My Dinner with Andre" is my all-time favorite film. I watch this movie often, each time of which I notice another layer of meaning. In addition to the superior dialogue and direction in this film (which other reviewers here have aptly described), the movie is rich, visually. This movie is not visually boring, despite the fact the cameras are on Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory for nearly two hours. Andre Gregory, especially, is such an engaging conversationalist that he evokes compelling mental images in the audience as to what these far away places might look like (i.e., the Sahara and the Polish forest to name a few). After all, Gregory said "I consider myself a bit of a Surrealist," meaning that the world of dream images in the mind's eye are the locus of true imagination. It's a superb use of the verbal to evoke the visual. Yes, the film is overtly naturalistic (i.e., the restaurant setting, a 2-hour meal with "real" characters), but the sheer dialogue transports one beyond mere verisimilitude. Having the audience imagine, in their own ways, what these venues might look like is so contrary to what we get so often in American movies today. We typically get in your-face visuals and glitzy special effects (e.g., "Lord of the Rings) that allows no room for viewer imagination: its all artificially provided for you. Such films leave me, to use Gregory's words, "passive and impotent." "My Dinner with Andre" respects its audience by reminding us what it is to be truly human. Having conversations as portrayed in this film is my ideal evening out with a good friend(s). I can't recommend this movie enough.

Quoting ebert..."its very hard to nail down great movies":
Give it a try: you'll either giveup in 15 minutes; or would get hooked to it. Like a evening breeze of a warm day, let the movie conversation flow easily. Play..Pause...think...rewind...think...rewatch....reflect. Its not going to change your life, but would defintely effect your view about it.

DP!=DVD:
Full Screen. Does that say full screen? What is the point of a DVD if not to deliver the full quality of the original print. All involved with this great film \oespecially its fans\c deserve something better than the VHS quality of the cassettes that routinely go missing from libraries. But this is not any better. Letterbox this movie. It is high time.