My Dinner with Andrae: A Screenplay

by André Gregory and Wallace Shawn

Book Overview

"My Dinner with Andre" is a passionate, volatile, and humorous encounter between two friends who have not seen each other for a long time, and decide to catch up on each others' lives over dinner.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039417948X
• ISBN13: 9780394179483
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
• Length: 113 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.

Customer Reviews

a unique gem

Do you ever get tired of endless conversations about how you hate your work, how you dislike and despise your co-workers and how much better you could do the job that your boss is doing? Are you fed up with conversations about the same ole things: shopping, computer news, weather, sports, the business world, gossip, society gossip? Do you feel, after seeing another mindless car chase/explosion/blow em up shoot out/gross out movie, or another regurgitated romantic comedy with its nauseatingly predictable storyline, dialogue and ending that you've had enough and you seriously need a change of pace, a window on a different view. If you are ready for a quiet but at turns funny, profound, silly, and very lively two hours, then get My Dinner with Andre; the best two hour conversation in the history of man. It's about a collision between two ideas about the nature of life; what keeps us going, what gives life meaning. Think of it this way, you're having dinner with someone and having the most boring conversation ever, and next to you are two people talking about all kinds of interesting things about what seems like everything under the sun. And you desperately want to be at that table. Well, this movie is that table. Some have accused this film of being pretentious. Give me a break. This is about the most unpretentious film you can get. But what this film is is flat out stimulating and brilliant.

A masterpiece! - The best movie of the past 25 years

I just finished this movie, and I feel like I need to simply get a few thoughts down before my head hits my pillow. I didn't know what to expect entering My Dinner With Andre - after all, it is a movie about two guys who have dinner in a restaurant and talk the whole time. But from the moment that the goofy-looking, awkward Wallace Shawn lumbers down a New York street and we hear his voice-over, I knew that something more was taking place in this movie. What it was, I had no idea. There are no character names; there is no 'plot;' Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, both prominent actors/playwrights of New York, meet after not having seen each other for years and they shoot the breeze. I learned that it's not as extemporaneous as I originally had imagined - Shawn and Gregory got together, recorded hours of their conversations, and then compiled a script based on them. The 'restaurant' is actually a defunct hotel, the waiters and barkeepers all actors. But there's a transcendence to it all, as the men sit and chat (mostly the powerful, lively Andre Gregory doing the talking), food being brought out to them. What heightens the power of the film is the setup that Wallace gives in the voice-over before their dinner: Andre, the man he meets, has been living a peculiar existence traveling all over the world, when he used to never want to leave his family. A friend of Wallace's saw Andre weeks before sobbing uncontrollably on the street because he was violently moved by a line in Bergman's Autumn Sonata. Like Wallace, we don't know what to expect in the very context of the dinner conversation. Some of the things that Andre and Wallace discuss in this movie are so unimaginably crazy, so hauntingly horrific, that even the mental images that went through my head sent chills all the way through me. At one point, Andre tells of a strange rite with some friends on Halloween in which some of them let him through a strange process of being stripped completely naked, bathed, led through a field, lowered into a grave and buried alive for half an hour. Of course, I tell you this just to tantalize you, because to begin to even summarize what goes on in 110 perfect minutes would be impossible. Andre and Wallace discuss love, marriage, perception and reality, theology, and even the validity of their very statements. That they relate it with such grace and raw, real emotion makes me refuse to believe that this was staged in any way. It feels so natural. I can't believe that something like this could actually make its way onto film, because it's such an amazing achievement for the art itself - in a way (especially in an early story that Andre tells about the nature of performance), seeing these men talk over dinner on film is the actual embodiment of a movie folding into itself in perpetuity. These men are real figures, play real figures in the film, recreate real conversations, and talk about reality in such a way that a heighten

Thought provoking film that will expand your thinking

First saw this movie when it came out. Went to see it with a group of friends. After the movie we went to an all night coffee shop and talked about the film and how it related to our lives until the sun came up. This film made me laugh, contemplate life then cry at the end when Andre talks about how one day his son was just a little boy and before he knew it, he saw his grown adult son standing before him and he wonders, where did that young child go? Where did that time go?This film is not for everyone. Have watched this film with people who wondered when the two characters were going to finish dinner, and when would the action pick up? Other people were left in the dark because they had never read "The Little Prince" and had no idea what Andre was talking about when he referred to the book. However, if you are someone who questions life and looks to find meaning or purpose in your life, you will be pleasantly surprised. At the end of the movie, I always need to talk with friends and loved ones about the issues that are always raised watching this film. For me, this is a film I have watched yearly (usually more) because it allows me to concentrate on what really is and is not important in life. This movie always puts life and all the "things" that happen in my life back, into perspective.Although Andre's adventures seem rather abstract at times, he eventually brings the conversation to a point where Wallace Shaw can understand what he is saying because he starts using examples and situations in every day life. He explains that you don't have to go to Tibet to meditate or be buried alived for the night in Poland to truly experience life and what it is all about. This is, by far, my favorite film and will always be my favorite film. Watching this movie is a gift I give to myself.

One of the few movies that really expands your horizons.

In the course of a two-hour conversation, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory prove that cinematic stasis need not be boring, and in fact can even change your life to some small extent. In a way, this is almost like listening to a conversation between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, if Quixote and Sancho were modern-day New York intellectuals. Andre, the Quixote of the film, speaks of his attempts to find meaning in his life by traveling around the world, staging avant-garde theater experiments, participating in the rites of bizarre death cults and consulting Buddhist monks; Wally, the Sancho, is happier to stay close to home, seeking contentment in a good cup of coffee or an electric blanket. But the two men are united in their mutual conviction that the unexamined life is not worth living. Andre's story about the fabulously wealthy duchess who starved to death because she refused to eat anything except chicken is much to the point. How many of us end up starving to death, in one way or another, in the midst of plenty? In any case, few people could come away from this movie without feeling a little more appreciation for the fragile beauty of life.

but no stars for the dvd

This is my favorite movie of all time. Period. You can sit inon the most interesting conversation ever and I've done it many times,every time finding myself thinking of different things, contemplating my own life and wondering about how crazy Andre actually is and how seriously to take his ideas about how human life came to an end a few decades ago, leaving us all robots in search of some twinge of real feeling. But the dvd is so bad I suspected it was a bootleg. When the camera switches from Andre to Wally the color completely changes. It's all grainy as if recorded on bad tape off a badly receiving tv. At one point a little white hair appears and vacillates on the lower screen for oh about 30 minutes. Are they kidding? There needs to be a new edition of this great movie, and those of us who bought this sham of a version should be allowed to trade it in. Here is a film critiquing the falseness of what our modern life has become: fine, but I don't need an object lesson costing me $20. Out of respect for the sublime Louis Malle, put out a new version!