Wallace Shawn, playing himself, is a failed, struggling playwright who is invited to have dinner with a successful theatre director, Andre Gregory, also playing himself. Gregory is a man who left the U.S. to presumably find himself, to frolic and immerse himself in nature that went beyond the concrete city confines of New York. He had traveled to India, a forest in Poland, the rough Sahara desert, and yet he never exactly found himself. He abandoned his New York family to "truly feel alive." As Gregory explains, "it led to an immediate awareness of death." To truly feel connected to life, he will feel just as connected to death. When Gregory recounts that he attended a Halloween-themed event in Montauk Point (gee, I am almost curious to revisit Montauk myself), he has to be stripped naked, be photographed (!), write a will and wear a blindfold as he is buried alive. Yep, that might make the life-death connection even sharper.
Wallace often listens to Gregory for the first hour or so, believing in being a "detective" or sorts since he likes asking questions. After some inordinate time of listening and eating pate with fish and potato soup, Wallace takes issues with Gregory's exotic trips to foreign lands and that we are living in a "dream world" where our perception of reality is gone, that we are in a trance or some sort of fog. Living habitually, Gregory argues, is "not really living." Shawn begins his spiel about how he appreciates comfort in knowing he can have a good cup of coffee, having warmth with an electric blanket, and that things merely are coincidences and not everything is predicated on chance from a fortune cookie or some esoteric book that seems to speaking what you are going through. You need not climb Everest to really live when you can discover just as much at the local cigar shop down the street.
"My Dinner With Andre" is an entertaining, profound and experimental film about the beauty of language where just talking to someone and being engaged by various topics can be fruitful. In today's world, a film about people talking without the benefits of technology may seem alien to most, perhaps boring. Not so with Louis Malle's film which seems to make it animated, hilarious at times, and often unsettling. Shawn and Gregory are well-defined by their radiant personalities and by their ability to truly delve into the modern world, the absurdity of doing nothing for moments at a time, the abrasiveness of the world, and how to really live. How could this be boring to anyone?
