A Few Words Over Dinner

I saw My Dinner with Andre with a friend when it came out in 1981. She was a museum curator, reliably smart and laconic, and she hated the film and threatened to leave the theater before it was over. She found it pretentious and dull, and I enjoyed it. Two guys sitting in a restaurant and talking for 110 minutes sounds daunting, but the writing is rich, relaxed and cleverly satirical, and Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory (who share screenwriting credits) are fine actors willing to make fun of themselves. That’s where my friend and I disagreed. The character played by Gregory, perhaps a stylized version of himself, is a full-of-himself gasbag. He reminds me of countless former acidheads, smug and histrionic, who have seated themselves among the Illuminati. The self-doubting Shawn character is the Sancho Panza of the film, earthbound ballast for the gassy, transcendental Gregory. A writer or filmmaker runs a risk when he creates an insufferable character – the story or film may turn insufferable.

I watched the film again Tuesday night on DVD, and I came to several conclusions: Gregory -- who in real life is the director who gave Shawn his first professional break as a playwright -- remains insufferable. He’s the sort of narcissistic charmer who seduces naïve young people, male and female, and not necessarily for sex. His type is common in Manhattan, where the film is set, but he has cousins in Omaha and Pensacola. He’s a cult leader looking for a cult, an actor whose role is permanent. The film makes this clear – as does the Shawn character from the start. Shawn is reluctant to meet Gregory again after many years but agrees out of guilt-ridden loyalty. In voiceover he says:

“It was obvious that something terrible had happened to Andre, and the whole idea of meeting him made me very nervous. I mean, I really wasn’t up for this sort of thing. I had problems of my own. I couldn’t help Andre – was I supposed to be a doctor, or what?”

The notion of a playwright asking if he is supposed to be a doctor reminds us of Chekhov, who was both. In 1994, Shawn and Gregory worked together in Vanya on 42nd Street, also directed by Louis Malle, about an acting company staging Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. In the same voiceover at the start of the film, Shawn says he will deal with his anxiety by assuming the role of private investigator and asking Gregory a lot of questions – a comfortable role I know well as a journalist, and one that Chekhov often employed. Asking empathetic questions exonerates one from feeling empathy. It’s a risk-free stance, and with a world-class talker like Gregory, guaranteed to succeed. In other words, Shawn is not being honest with himself or Gregory – which is not the same as lying. The film is subtle look at the mixed, self-deceiving emotions and motives, the white lies and rule-bending, we engage in daily.

I’m reminded again of Chekhov, a rather cool customer. In 1890, he traveled 6,500 miles by train, horse-drawn carriage and river steamer to the Russian penal colony on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan, and spent three months interviewing convicts and settlers. The resulting book, The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin, has been read as a crusading documentary on the appalling conditions in which Russian prisoners lived. True, but here’s what Chekhov wrote in a letter to his friend Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov shortly before embarking:

“I am not going in order to observe or get impressions, but simply so that I can live for half a year as I have never lived up to this time. So don’t expect anything of me, old fellow; if I have the time and ability to achieve anything, then glory be to God; if not, don’t find fault with me.”

The first two-thirds of My Dinner with Andre consists of one far-fetched Gregory story after another. Shawn asks an occasional question, or grunts, or emits one of his squeal-like laughs. There’s a clear imbalance of power, with Gregory on top. But Shawn reaches a point where he’s heard enough -- one too many tales of all-night revels, giant vegetables and fauns in the forest. He finally, haltingly, speaks up and challenges Gregory’s juggernaut of bullshit. I quote from the published screenplay:

“You know, the truth is, I think I do know what really disturbs me about this work that you’ve described – and I don’t even know if I can express it, Andre – but somehow, if I’ve understood what you’ve been saying, it somehow seems that the whole point of the work that you did in those workshops, when you get right down to it and ask what it really was all about – the whole point, really, I think, was to enable the people in the workshops, including yourself, to somehow sort of strip away every scrap of purposefulness from certain selected moments. And the point of it was so that you would then be able to experience somehow just pure being….And I think I just simply object to that. I mean, I just don’t think I accept the idea that there should be moments in which you’re not trying to do anything. I think it’s our nature to do things. I think purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure. And to say that we ought to be able to live without it is like saying that a tree ought to be able to live without branches or roots; but actually, without branches or roots, it wouldn’t be a tree. I mean, it would just be a log.”

In other words, dead. One feels like cheering, as we do when Dr. Johnson refutes the idealism of Bishop Berkeley by kicking a stone. It’s the triumph of humanity and good sense over preeningly cerebral and arid ideology. Shawn goes on to defend his use of an electric blanket against Gregory’s smug asceticism, and the exchange is hilarious.

In his notebooks, Chekhov writes, “The more refined the more unhappy.”