Small Bore

By R.S.

MY DINNER WITH ANDRE

Directed by Louis Malle

Screenplay by Wallace Shawn and #21 Gregory

In a Manhattan restaurant, a round, balding actor-playwright named Wallace Shawn sits down to dinner with a lean, overarticulate theatrical director named Andre Gregory. The friends have not seen one another for some years mostly because Gregory has spent that time searching the world for transcendental experiences. He has been to adult play groups in Poland, Scotland, Tibet, the Sahara--and Montauk Point. It is a measure of what is wrong with this movie (and maybe with the culture of the '80s) that neither man sees anything funny about the intrusion of that last prosaic place on this otherwise exotic list. Nichols and May would have known what to do with it.

The pair settle down to chomp through civilization and its discontents along with their quail. Gregory does most of the talk ing, and such disagreements as they have are politely put. Shawn seeks a certain comfort in routine; Gregory obviously seeks the intensification of experience that can result from a daily questioning of one's routines. Neither wants to pick a fight or, for that matter, make a convert. At most, it would seem, Andre wants to make certain that his odyssey was not in vain, that he learned something for his trouble. And, it must be said, there are several anecdotes that are not without interest in the retell ing, one or two observations about the ways of the world that are acute.

One of Gregory's points is that nowa days there is so much role playing, so much self-dramatization going on in real life, that it has rendered the formal theatrical experience superfluous. Why go to a play or movie to see someone act a part when friends (and strangers) are doing it all around us all the time? One imagines, since Shawn and Gregory wrote this piece in a glumly realistic man ner, and play them selves with shameless conviction, that they intend to demonstrate that a dramatic work can actually be less stagy, more authentic, than life.

Louis Malle, who has a deserved reputation for taking on dangerous projects (Pretty Baby, Murmur of the Heart), was obviously attracted to the challenge of doing what amounts to an antimovie, static and minimalist. He has functioned, it seems, pretty much in the manner of a good TV technician handling a Sunday-morning inter view show. His work is smooth, objective, unobtrusive. His manner certainly suits a script that was distilled from hundreds of hours of taped conversations between its author-protagonists.

As a conception My Dinner with Andre is interesting in a kind of off-off Broadway way. One can imagine trendy New York twittering about it for weeks -- well, any way, days. And if the protagonists were, by nature, men of Shavian wit and intellectual range it might have worked. But they are merely fake profound, in the show biz manner. Their pose may be antitheatrical, but the pair are, in fact, theatrical in the very worst, or drama student, sense of the term.

Wallace and Andre, in short, are two Woody Allen characters in need of an intelligently ironic author to deflate them. Since he is no where to be found, audiences are advised to bring along their do-it-yourself satire kits.

-- R.S.

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