Review of The Dinner (2017) by Matt C — 04 May 2017

Growing up, I was told to ignore people that said or did obnoxious things since they weren't worth my time. Unless it was something so notably horrendous that must be met with a rebuttal at once, these types of people simply would simply drag me down to their level upon involvement.

The Dinner is not just full of these types of people, but the movie itself is the cinematic embodiment of these types of people. Pointless, excruciating, and--to use one of my least favorite words--pretentious, it's thoroughly empty and annoying, damned with a horrible execution of an ambitious structure that leads to uneven and unmotivated aesthetic choices and an incredibly convoluted story that's impossible to care about--and possibly the worst use of Steve Coogan in history.

The third adaptation and first American adaptation of Herman Koch's novel, it follows Paul Lohman (Coogan), an ex-teacher, who goes out with his trophy wife Claire (Laura Linney) for dinner with Paul's senator brother Stan (Richard Gere) and Stan's equally passive wife Katelyn (Rebecca Hall).

They're all meeting together to discuss something heinous that their sons have committed together. However, the movie is mostly a collection of cobbled-together flashbacks with incredibly desaturated colors in order to differentiate the chronology.

There's also a waiter (Michael Chernus) that keeps trying to explain their food to them as fanciful, superimposed cursive text shows up on the screen and fourth wall-breaking by way of unneeded point-of-view shots as if to make the tone more amiable at times or something.

Quite frankly, it's rather impressive to make a movie that's this much of a mess. It's an overdrawn, boring, unlikeable, two-hour mess that lacks the self-awareness or cohesion to justify its content.

I tend to enjoy movies with repellant characters--some recent examples that come to mind are Nocturnal Animals and the work of Todd Solondz. Writer/director Oren Moverman is no Tom Ford or Solondz, though.

He has no voice, no working sense of humor, no ability to juggle multiple characters, no ability to shift between settings and periods of time. The final product is soul-crushingly dull, and if someone were to tell me that this movie were actually over three hours, I'd quickly believe them.

But no, it's 120 minutes (including credits) of on-the-nose dialogue placed into an itchy void of jumbled material that has the same impact as watching something out of context entirely. What's supposed to be a look at privilege is wholly misguided, squandering its actors.

Coogan is cringeworthy at times under Moverman's direction, and Hall, who gave the best performance of 2016 in Christine, is minimized to barely even existing until the ostensible climax of the film.

By then, audience interest has waned into less-than-zero territory, and the amorality of the characters bleeds into the immorality of the movie itself. 2.3/10, disastrous, D-, leagues below average, etc.