My Day With “My Dinner With Andre”

In the first decade of the sixteenth century, Raphael, great painter of the Italian Renaissance, painted a fresco called The School of Athens in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. The painting was chosen to represent the concept of Philosophy, with its two sister paintings, La Disputa and Parnassus representing theology and literature respectively.

At the centre of The School of Athens, which is filled with historical philosophical figures seemingly locked in intense, eternal debate, stand two giants of Western philosophy: Plato, and his protegé-cum-dissenter Aristotle. Plato, clutching a copy of the Timaeus, gestures with his right hand to the sky, and Aristotle, clutching a copy of the Nicomachaean Ethics, gestures with his right hand to the Earth. Plato concerns himself with the transcendent; Aristotle with the immanent. Or, to put it another way, Plato concerns himself with the unearthly; Aristotle with the earthbound.

It was hard for me not to think about this painting while watching My Dinner With Andre, the 1981 drama film that stars Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory.

There’s very little to be said about My Dinner With Andre that hasn’t already been said. It’s a film that is synonymous with “art cinema” for most people, and has been referenced a number of times in popular culture – The Simpsons features a joke in which Martin Prince, the precociously cultured schoolboy, plays an arcade game based on the film, and the sitcoms Frasier and Community both did episodes based exclusively on the film.

The film critic Roger Ebert said that My Dinner With Andre was the only film he could think of that was devoid of all clichés, and there is a good reason for this.

The two-hour-long film consists, essentially, of three scenes: The first follows a bedraggled (and fictionalised) Wallace Shawn on his way to a restaurant after a hectic day, griping in voiceover about his money problems and life problems; the middle (and longest) scene consists of Wally meeting Andre Gregory – who we are told has apparently suffered some sort of nervous breakdown – in the restaurant, and the two of them share a lengthy conversation that meanders and wanders in the way that conversations tend to do; and the final scene consists of Wally getting into a cab and, as a result of his conversation, being given a new perspective on life by Gregory.

On the surface, this sounds boring – after all, who would want to watch a movie about two guys talking for almost two hours if that was how it was pitched? But the film is far more than just two guys talking. Of course, on the most superficial level, it’s about that, but on a deeper and more philosophically involved level, it’s a film about many things. It’s a film about – or a film that at very least touches upon – mental illness, friendship, memory, New York, fine dining, hyperreality, love, existentialism, spirituality, theatre, capitalism, death, synchronicity, totalitarianism, conflict, and ultimately, the act of conversation itself.

Despite the setting simply being a restaurant, there are things that come up in conversation in the film that are genuinely frightening; there are moments that come up in conversation in the film that are genuinely moving. We voyeurs behind the fourth wall feel somehow part of this private conversation, as though we are a phantom third guest invited to sit and listen to these two men talk about their lives and their anxieties.

The two men are at odds with the other’s worldview – Wally, like Aristotle, has a very materialist, humanistic, utilitarian view of the world; while Andre, like Plato, has a very spiritual, transcendental, idealist view of the world. Both men bring their own neuroses to the conversation – Wally’s anxieties about money and where his next meal is coming from juxtaposed with Andre’s more existential anxieties about death, the purpose of life, and his apparent struggles with depression as a result of that.

I could not possibly summarise the conversation here in the same way that I could not possibly summarise any of my own conversations with friends; we begin with Andre explaining what he’s been up to in the last decade after quitting his job as a theatre director (travelling the world and partaking in strange performance art), and the film from there delves into what really concerns the two men.

In fact, over the course of the film, the two men have what might be the most gentle argument in all cinema – they disagree on many key aspects of each other’s worldview, but there is nothing so objectionable in the other’s worldview to provoke anger or outright disgust, just quiet disagreement, much as we might have in conversation with our own friends – no resentment present, just a simple conflict of ideas.

And yet, this is all theatre. The conversation, much as it seems improvised, had a screenplay. It was rehearsed. It was filmed again and again with different takes. This is not to say that the film lacks authenticity – far from it – but rather that it, being a film about two men who work in theatre, provides a sort of meta-commentary on theatre itself; despite its minimalism, the film is theatre in its own right; neither man is actually playing himself, but a character that bears the same name and likeness. Shawn even stated in 2009: “I wanted to destroy that guy that I played, to the extent that there was any of me there. I wanted to kill that side of myself by making the film, because that guy is totally motivated by fear.

In fact, the restaurant in which the two men are sitting was actually a set in a vacant hotel in Virginia (since reopened), done up to look like a fancy French restaurant somewhere in New York. The film looks like it takes place in real time, but it in fact took two weeks to shoot. We are led to believe, watching it, that this is all one conversation meandering for two hours, but this is as much a trick of the edit as any special effect. The film is a simulation of reality masquerading (quite convincingly!) as reality; not reality itself.

In the film, Andre describes his participation in numerous performance art pieces; living in the woods for weeks with forty people who could not speak English; travelling to the Sahara to do an adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (which Andre derides as containing “a kind of SS totalitarian sentimentality”), and being temporarily buried alive while part of a performance troupe on Long Island. This film, also, is a performance art piece: it is a performance art piece about performance art, or rather, about what it is to perform.

Later in the film, Andre finds himself concerned with the fact that people seem to simply perform roles that others have attributed to them, and worries that this drives us away from living life as it “truly is” when it is stripped of all semiotics, signifiers and concepts – something that Wally protests; he finds comfort in having his niche, in certainty, while Andre finds that certainty, and indeed comfort, is dangerous, and sleepwalks people into being “robots”. He jokes that in ten years from their conversation, people might end up paying $10,000 to be castrated just to feel something, but he also says, quite gravely, that he feels that the 1960s was the last gasp of the free human spirit, and that modern life has become so mechanised that people simply cannot think any more, and this seems to depress him considerably, leading to his apparent breakdown.

At various points, Andre mentions or alludes to Nazism – he says that he can imagine an SS officer quite enjoying The Little Prince; compares himself to Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect; and more than once uses the term “totalitarian”. Both Shawn and Gregory are from Jewish families, and while never explicitly discussed, this undercurrent of anxiety pertaining to Nazis and Nazism pervades the film; it seems apparent that Andre regards Nazism as heralding the death of human individuality, while Wally, who almost never mentions or alludes to Nazism, seems to regard Nazism as a painful, but thankfully long-gone part of history.

For Andre, ultimately, he feels that he is unable to live authentically no matter what he tries, and feels trapped, while for Wally, living authentically is as simple as waking up in the morning and knowing everything is there. Yet, all the same, Wally starts the film in a disheveled state, looking lethargic on the graffito’d subway train, even having to put a tie on just before entering the restaurant, while Andre starts the film apparently in high spirits. By the end of the film, the conversation and argument have reached no resolution; Andre feels just as depressed as ever, and yet Wally leaves the restaurant with a sense of awe as he looks out of the window of a taxicab, seeing memories flash by as the cab speeds him home.

This is not a film with any substantial plot. There is no real character development except in that Wally fleetingly sees the city in a more enlightened way post-conversation. The ending is neither happy nor sad. It is, like life, a small episode in the fictitious lives of two men, and life ends when it ends. The conversation itself is tapered simply by the end of the meal and the need to pay the bill as the restaurant is closing. Do we say that our conversations with our friends had happy or sad endings? Of course not. Some conversations depress us; others uplift us, but ultimately, the act of conversation is simply two minds exchanging ideas before moving away to occupy themselves with other things. It is as intimate as it is frivolous, and yet it is a vital part of our social lives.

In one part of the film, Andre mentions a strange experience with synchronicity he had; just before setting off to the Sahara to adapt The Little Prince, he visited a friend’s house and saw that they had bound copies of a 1930s Surrealist magazine, Minotaure, which he opened to a random page, and found that it contained four handprints with names beginning with A, three of them being Andre, and the final one being Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Wally later dismisses this as “coincidence”, but it got me thinking about my own experiences of synchronicity.

This morning, after a strange dream in which I fell in love with a very tall, muscular, red-haired woman, I woke to the sound of “Girlfriend is Better” by Talking Heads playing on the radio. More specifically, I woke to the sound of the final chorus: “Stop making sense, stop making sense / Stop making sense, making sense / I got a girlfriend, she’s better than that / And nothing is better than this…” It was as though the radio was giving me cryptic advice: “Stop making sense!”

I went out for a walk and picked up some lunch, then came home. Around one p.m. I put on My Dinner With Andre for the first time, and it suddenly felt like the film had been waiting until this specific day to reveal itself to me. This is, of course, a bit narcissistic, so let me qualify that: I’ve been aware of this film for some time, but it was only today that I chose to watch it. It seems fitting that the day I watch the film should start with an experience that ends up discussed in the very film I ended up watching. I won’t say there’s a “supernatural” reason for that; I don’t look at numbers I see in public and assume they’re angel numbers, though I do always salute magpies (and as it happens, I saw heaps of magpies this morning) – but there was a sort of poetic quality to it.

And I think that’s what’s interesting about this film; its theatre and presentation is so simple, and yet so wide-reaching; in two hours of two men talking, it covers so much ground that everyone bringing something to it will take something different away from it. I didn’t even know what I was bringing to the film before I put it on, and yet I came away, like Wally, feeling like, even for a moment, I had gained a fleeting appreciation for how beautiful and strange this world is; and while Wally ends his arc with a sort of Proustian reminiscence about times past, my day ended with this – part essay, part journal, part ramble, part review, part autobiographical musing.

Just as the film ends without any sort of resolution, I end this writing without one either. Sometimes things don’t need some definite point. Sometimes it’s okay to just think out loud.