This year's lone American entry in competition causes serious indigestion
The impulse of mothers to protect their children, at all cost, undergirds the sole American competition entry at this year’s Berlin Film festival, “The Dinner,” directed by Oren Moverman and based on the novel by Dutch author Herman Koch.
The theme is compelling, but truth be told, "The Dinner" is also about too many other things. Presented in a choppy, non-chronological style, it often resembles a student film by a talented kid with a severe case of ADHD.
A group of celebrated actors (Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Rebecca Hall, Steve Coogan, Chloe Sevigny) circle around the central moral quandary - how far would you go to shelter your child? – but fail to hit their mark thanks to a messy script and sloppier mįse-en-scene. Beautiful to behold, thanks to Bobby Bukowski’s luminous and lucid cinematography, it is an invitation to a banquet prepared by chef whose ambitions outstrip his talent.
The film is about many things: mothers, fathers, brothers, husband, wives (first and second), ambition, integrity and truth. It is about privilege and responsibility. It is about illness: both mental and physical. It is about the pain of being marginalized within your own family. It is about the limits of love. It short, it is too many films squeezed into one.
Moverman organizes all this around a well-worn cinematic trope: the highly mannered dinner party full of cataclysmic revelations; but this film suffers from pretentious silliness of the upscale restaurant that main set piece. Against this haute cuisine artifice, it misleads the audience into thinking that the film will be a wry farce about social conventions when, in fact, what we get in a psychological thriller.
Or do we?
In “The Dinner” we are never certain just what we are being served. The bulk of the film is told in confusing flashbacks that lurch back and forward through several decades. By the time dessert arrives, a plot has only started to take form.
With its deliberately non-linear style, “The Dinner” centers around a horrific murder of a homeless woman perpetrated by two drunk teens. These happen to be the son and nephew of Stan Lohman, ably played by Gere, a handsome, popular Oregon senator who is running for governor and his combustible, underachieving yet possibly brilliant brother Paul, portrayed by Coogan in a wildly uneven performance. Is Coogan’s character a marvelously cranky yet astute social critic or just a pathetic loser of a husband, father and high school history teacher? We never quite know.
Handled with care, ambiguous characters can enrich a film, creating a sense of collusion between filmmaker and audience. Here, however, slogging through this impressionistic film, we watch dumbfounded as characters shed their veils – often abruptly – in ways thoroughly devoid of the art of the strip tease. Linney’s soft-spoken, cancer-surviving supporting wife turns out to be an accomplice to her murderer-son. Hall’s young trophy wife turns out to be a calculating criminal mastermind on steroids. Gere’s polished public persona masks his moral fortitude and Coogan’s contrarian Woody Allenesque history teacher, who at first seems the film’s moral center, might actually be the most dangerous of them all. Is this film a commentary on the erosion of the family unity in contemporary American, or merely a study of one particularly dysfunctional clan? Its difficult not to hear an echo of Arthur Miller in the name “Lohman.” Is “The Dinner” the director’s depiction of The Death of the American Family.
In the end, “The Dinner” is a food fight with bite-sized pieces of its identity whizzing past our heads. Where it succeeds is by slowly unpeeling the layers of duplicity, revealing the collusion between Linney’s character and her son Michael (Charlie Plummer) and the toxic triangulation that leads to further tragedy. The way she calmly lies to her helpless husband is perhaps the most chilling and horrifying aspect of the film.
If Moverman’s intentions were to unsettle his audience, he has certain succeeded. We leave the film emotionally shaken and confused, while feeling that somewhere in the morass of the previous 120 minutes one could salvage a tasty and satisfying dish. In its current state, however, this dinner merely causes indigestion.