Dinner With Friends
Dinner with Friends is the tale of what happens to people when those close to them divorce. I chose this, being in the mood for a bit of introspection, expecting just that. We all know that divorce affects more than just the divorcing couple, and this movie approaches the topic from the point of view of said couple’s closest friends.
The film opens with Gabe (Dennis Quaid) and Karen (Andie Mac Dowell), in montage form, on a tour of Italy, specifically, Italian cuisine. They write about food professionally, and work together as a couple. Upon their return home, they invite their closest friends, Tom (Greg Kinnear) and Beth (Toni Collette) for dinner, seemingly for the sole purpose of regaling them with endless stories of their marvelous trip and the fabulous food. To their surprise, Beth shows up with the kids, but no Tom, who is said to be away on business.
Beth is visibly miserable as the couple prattles on about their trip, and eventually breaks down and confides that Tom has left her for another woman. Karen is immediately indignant and angry, unable to fathom how this person she thought she knew so well could have done such a thing. Gabe is silent, and the camera shots of his expressions are wonderful. He is clearly not comfortable with the universal condemnation being heaped on his friend, and, for the first time all evening, is quite speechless. Scattered throughout all this drama are quips and comments about the food, the kids, etc. These are well placed and add a nice bit of humor.
When we finally meet Tom, he is coming home, more or less because he can’t get to his girlfriend and is looking for a place to sleep (and someone to sleep with) which he finds in Beth following a vicious argument that ends in meaningless sex. He interrogates her about her evening, clearly in lawyer mode before we even know he is one, and is very upset that she told Gabe and Karen of their split (all the while breaking to ask how the food was). His feeling is that now she has the upper hand, and they will side with her, because they won’t listen tohis side.
Tom then sets off to tell Gabe and Karen his side, how he was not being supported, she never heard his cries for help (apparently telepathically delivered), he had been miserable for years, just playing the part of husband and father, and now had found a woman devoted to his needs. Kinnear plays the role of Tom with a sort of gleeful smugness. He knows his character is a contemptible a*s, and he seems to enjoy delivering every cliché, every bit of mid-life crisis crap ever to be seen on the talk show circuit. His clear understanding of his character lightens him up considerably, and the viewer is able to take some pleasure in this pathetic cliché of a man, full of himself and puffed up with the idea that he’s still a virile stud.
The story proceeds with a flashback of the meeting of Tom and Beth, and the evolution of this long time, very close friendship. Gabe and Karen question both their friend’s choices as well as their own lives, wondering how all the years the four have spent together could just end so abruptly.
Analysis
I’m not usually so formal in dividing a review into sections, but this movie just begs for a distinction between (sort of) objective and (completely) subjective.
First of all, if Gabe and Karen were my best friends, I would be crazier than I already am. Stark, raving, straightjacket crazy. These are the two most anal-retentive people you may ever meet on film, particularly with their constant critiquing of every bite of food they place in their mouths. These are funny moments in the film, but the thought of actually hanging out with them makes me want to eat cereal three meals a day and make them watch. Karen is judgmental and rigid, and Quaid seems to be under the impression that Gabe needs to be quite effeminate, particularly early in the movie. As they examine their views on infidelity and the changes a marriage undergoes over time, I want to say, DUH! They have been married for twelve years, have two kids, and are just figuring out that their marriage may be a wee bit different than when they were newlyweds?! NO KIDDING! It seems like anyone who’s been married for more than five minutes, especially with kids, figures this one out early on. And, for crying out loud, they talk incessantly, I can’t believe they never talked about this! In addition to all this, the dream Karen talks about at the end is the most made up dream I have ever heard. I swear no one in the history of the world has ever had such a ludicrously obvious dream at such a ludicrously opportune time. Hokey, hokey, hokey.
As for Tom and Beth, they are not as annoying as they are sad (although I think the gray in Kinnear’s hair was sprayed on out of a can – kinda annoying). It is sad to realize how true these characters are. Both actors do a good job at portraying the ongoing tedium of divorce, both emotionally and logistically, as there are children. It’s easy to sympathize with Beth as the injured party, seeing as how Tom is such an a*s, but she’s no angel either. We also get to see them moving on from the pain (at least for Beth) of divorce and entering new phases of their lives with enthusiasm, something which Gabe and Karen can’t quite fathom.
The most interesting part of the film is the effect the divorce has on Gabe and Karen, not in terms of examining their own relationship, but in terms of coming to grips with the idea that their past with these people was not what they thought. There is a wonderful scene where Beth and Tom are having what amounts to revenge sex that cuts right to a pretentious Gabe saying, “You just don’t know what people are really like in their own homes!” The more Beth and Tom find new lives for themselves, the more they become removed from the friends that used to make up such a large part of their lives as a couple. It’s an interesting study of how friendships are not unconditional; they have a context, which, once removed, leaves all involved at a loss for how to proceed.
Overall, Dinner With Friends does provide some interesting material to discuss when it is through, about the nature of friendship and the effects of divorce. The performances are fairly good, with Toni Collettte and Greg Kinnear standing out. Quaid and MacDowell are fine as well; their characters just made me a bit insane. A thoughtful movie, and one that I would recommend for someone looking for a bit of a discussion afterward. The characters won’t be to everyone’s liking, but people rarely are. The rather continuous scattering of funny bits helps lighten the overall tone, and keeps this from being simple sap.
