APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION
The Dinner’s philosophical fulminations will have you reaching for an antacid
In Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film The Exterminating Angel, the guests at a dinner party find themselves inexplicably unable to leave the host’s house after the meal. It’s a feeling not unlike that experienced by critics, who are duty- and honour-bound to sit through an entire film (and any Marvel post-credit scenes), before delivering a verdict.
But in the latest from Oren Moverman (The Messenger, Rampart), based on a novel by Dutch author Herman Koch, I wanted out about halfway through, while the main characters were still working on the main course. When Rebecca Hall angrily refused dessert, saying she’d had enough, I was right with her.
The story is set during a meal shared by two brothers and their wives. Paul Lohman (Steve Coogan, barking in an unpleasant but perfect American accent) is a retired teacher working on a book about the Civil War. Laura Linney is Claire, his wife. They’ve been invited to dine with Paul’s congressman brother (Richard Gere) and his second wife (Hall).
Paul is not a particularly sympathetic man, but he starts out as (barely) the more likable of the brothers. True, he’s a misanthrope who likens humanity to “apes with cellphones,” but at least he’s honest about it. Still, as the evening progresses and Paul’s academically inflected patter wears down on everyone both within the movie and in the audience, we may find ourselves aligning with the put-upon waiter (Michael Chernus) or with Kamryn (Taylor Rae Almonte), the congressman’s assistant. They didn’t ask for this either.
The topic of conversation is something the brothers’ children may have done. Actually, they did do it — they assaulted a homeless woman they found in an ATM kiosk — but Moverman’s shifty script and multiple, unreliable flashbacks leave it unclear as to just how bad things got, who participated and what their feelings are now.
Time and again we slide into past events filtered through the present crisis. We meet the congressman’s first wife (Chloë Sevigny) and his adopted son Beau (Miles J. Harvey), the topic of an extended discussion when Claire accuses her husband of being racist — the child is black — and he counters that he just knows a bad seed when he sees one. And more than once we witness the assault, each time with a slightly different emphasis. Did the boys throw the kiosk’s trash can at the woman, or did they go outside to find something?
Clearly, the idea here is to play with our sympathies and expectations, tugging us one way and then another as more information comes to light, and as personalities deepen from sketches into portraits. But the way the information is revealed feels like a cheat — maybe it works better in the novel, or in the two recent adaptations, one in Dutch and one in Italian, that preceded this one.
And the ending — the dessert and coffee, if you will — plays out as a tirade, a philosophical fulmination when the situation calls for natural dialogue. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and suggests that here is a meal you could quite easily choose to skip.