Conflicts come to a boil over absurdly lavish meal
A small, clammy film of deep moral and ethical discomfort, interrupted by ridiculously swank food, writer-director Oren Moverman’s “The Dinner” comes from the 2009 Dutch novel by Herman Koch already adapted for the screen twice: in a 2013 Dutch production and a year later in a looser Italian-language edition. To say the story’s premise travels easily between cultures doesn’t mean “The Dinner” is easy material. The new film has a blue-chip cast and a writer-director well suited to the emotional terrain. Why aren’t the results more compelling?
Partly, it’s a matter of statement versus overstatement. Koch’s premise is a blunt, effective statement of dramatic purpose. In Moverman’s film, a psychologically shaky professor of history (Steve Coogan, holding nothing back as Paul) and his suspiciously patient wife, Claire (Laura Linney), agree to have dinner with the history teacher’s brother, Stan (Richard Gere), a hotshot U.S. congressman. Rebecca Hall plays his wife, Katelyn, and I truly wish everything in “The Dinner” had the laser impact of Hall’s reading of the line: “Pipe down and listen, you
Stan has convened this get-together at a fashionable restaurant specializing in nearly absurd levels of progressive gourmet dining. Paul’s class warfare impulses spin out of control early and often; appalled at the price of the Champagne, he declares the stuff “an act of war.”
The conversation is confined initially to small talk about each others’ sons, with a few detours into the miserable childhood endured by Paul, whose abusive mother always liked Stan best. Then comes the real discussion topic. The teenage sons we’ve heard about are in serious trouble. One recent night, drunk and reckless, the boys encountered a homeless woman sleeping in an ATM lobby. The ensuing just-for-kicks violence turned fatal; one son’s cellphone footage has gone viral, though the boys’ identities remain unknown to the police. “The Dinner” gradually becomes a debate about what the parents should or shouldn’t do on behalf of their loved ones, brats and sociopaths though they are.
Koch’s scenario can be seen as an ink-black comedy of manners, though the way Moverman directs his script, the ironies and turnabouts tend to clang and clunk. The contrast between insufferably haute cuisine and hypocritical, increasingly appalling justifications for the boys’ actions is stark, deliberately so. At the same time, Moverman and his regular cinematographer, the excellent Bobby Bukowski, favor slow zooms and sideways-slipping framing reminiscent of Robert Altman, reflecting the shifting moral stances of everyone implicated in this family matter.
“The Dinner” has precisely the women, Linney and Hall, it needs. They’re wizards at the smiling zinger, as they carefully reveal the steel behind the smiles. The men are more problematic: Gere’s tetchy exasperation often reads like actorly frustration or boredom, and while Coogan works hard at finding what makes Paul tick, like a time bomb, the effort feels, well, effortful.
Moverman’s previous films include “The Messenger” and “Rampart,” both very good, and he co-wrote “Love & Mercy” (the terrific Beach Boys biopic) and “I’m Not There” (the Bob Dylan fantasia). But “The Dinner” feels tonally indistinct and plays as a bit of a grind. Moverman will be back, though. He’s managed too much worthwhile work in his career not to deliver more, and soon.