My Dinner With Andre

Released 1981
Stars Andre Gregory, Wallace, Shawn, Roy Butler, Jean Lenauer
Directed by Louis Malle

Someone asked me the other day if I could name a movie that was entirely devoid of cliches. I thought for a moment, and then answered, "My Dinner With Andre." Now I have seen the movie again; a restored print is going into release around the country, and I am impressed once more by how wonderfully odd this movie is, how there is nothing else like it. It should be unwatchable, and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted

The title serves as a synopsis. We meet the playwright Wallace Shawn, on his way to have dinner with "a man I'd been avoiding, literally, for a matter of years." The man is Andre Gregory, a well-known New York theater director. Gregory had dropped out of sight, Shawn tells us, and there were reports that he was "traveling." Wally and Andre meet, sit down, talk for almost two hours. As in all conversations, the tide of energy flows back and forth, but mostly it is Andre doing the talking, and Wally the listening. Wally is a man who likes to wrap himself in cozy domesticity. He is round, earnest, squinting. His father, William, was for many years the editor of the New Yorker. "When I was young and rich," he says, "all I thought about was art and music. Now I'm 36, and all I think about is money." His friend Andre is tall, thin, angular. He has returned from far-off lands with strange tales, which he relates with twinkling eagerness.

In a sense, they are simply carriers for a thrilling drama--a film with more action than "Raiders of the Lost Ark." What it exploits is the well-known ability of the mind to picture a story as it is being told. Both Shawn and Gregory are born storytellers, and as they talk we see their faces, but we picture much more: Andre being buried alive, and a monk lifting himself by his fingertips, and fauns cavorting in a forest. And Wally trudging around to agents with his plays, and happily having dinner with Debbie, and, yes, enjoying Heston's autobiography. We see all of these things so vividly that "My Dinner With Andre" never, ever, becomes a static series of two shots and closeups, but seems only precariously anchored to that restaurant, and in imminent danger of hurtling itself to the top of Everest (where, Wally stubbornly argues, it is simply not necessary to go to find the truth).

Summary by Roger Ebert