My Dinner with Andre

I shed a few tears over My Dinner with Andre, Louis Malle’s famous 1981 dialogue film with Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory. I’m not sure what induced my tearfulness, probably the recognition that, over the years, my allegiances have shifted. When I first saw the movie in the theater, of course, I was appalled by Andre Gregory’s narcissism and self-indulgence – Gregory is formidably intelligent, but like most people of that kind, also incredibly gullible. There’s no New Age scam that he doesn’t try or fall for. Wally, of course, represents pragmatism and common sense. I now see that Andre is desperate, that he is horribly depressed, and that he will probably commit suicide after the dinner – in effect, the dinner is his last supper. And, now, I find myself identifying most strongly with Andre’s character – I feel in my heart and bones his despair and it moves me enormously. When the film was first released, it was widely regarded as a kind of weird novelty – two men talking incessantly in an expensive restaurant. I now know that Shawn, who wrote most of the film, wanted it to be three hours long and that the picture derives from Gregory’s attempt to write a memoir about his fantastically interesting adventures at the weird fringe of theater – particularly his association with the Polish visionary Jerzy Grotowski. However, Gregory and Shawn both denied that the film was autobiographical or that they were playing themselves – in fact, they told the press that they could have released another version with Gregory playing Andre and vice-versa, something that sounds plausible, I suppose, but that would produce a totally different (if equally fascinating) film experience. Viewed at this distance, the movie seems very similar to Shawn’s great, horrifying monologue The Designated Mourner – it has Shawn’s characteristic style of discourse, both with respect to Wally as well as Andre’s character. The movie’s ascetic staging also prefigures Malle’s great version of Uncle Vanya, Vanya on 42nd Street, also featuring a stunning performance by Shawn. In other words, the picture seems to fall directly within the scope of Shawn’s later works; Gregory provides the exorbitant material for his monologue, but the voice in which he speaks seems Shawn’s. The film’s power lies in the fact that Gregory is instantly recognizable as a kind of theatrical metaphor – the indefatigable searcher after truth, someone like Peter Brooks with his obsessive interest in Tibetan mystics and Gurdijeff, or Grotowski whose giant shadow lies across half the film. A man of the theater, Gregory is highly theatrical, high-strung, emotional to the point of hysteria – everything is a performance for him, not surprisingly, but he despairs that any performance can be sufficiently authentic to real human experience. He is always acting and, then, decrying the fact that he is acting. (At one point, he says he wanted to get a morque attendant to loan him a real human head to pass around the audience at a New Haven performance of the Bacchae). Gregory is ecstatic, visionary, monstrously self-absorbed – we can define his character quickly and efficiently by a set of salient features. The strength of the film is that Wally is very hard to define; he’s not a figure of allegorical Dostoevsky-like excess like Gregory. It’s very, very hard to articulate what Wally’s character represents because, in fact, he seems to overcome Gregory’s despairing critique of theater and the theatrical – Wally seems like a real person trapped in a conversation with a larger-than-life monster of self-indulgence. And, yet, Wally is tremendously intelligent as well and holds his own – and, in fact, I think the hidden subtext of the dinner is that Wally’s implicit but scathing refutation of Andre’s endless searching will result in that character killing himself. This film, once thought of as a novelty, is, in fact, a very great work and one that repays different viewings with different and new perspectives and insights – like all great works its both very simple and endlessly and productively complex.