The Dinner (2017)

The Dinner (2017)

IMDB rating : 5.9/10 (as on 04.05.2017)

R | 2h | Drama, Mystery, Thriller

A look at how far parents will go to protect their children. Feature film based on a novel by Herman Koch.

Director: Oren Moverman

Writers: Oren Moverman (screenplay), Herman Koch (novel)

Stars: Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Steve Coogan

IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆  

Brothers' conflict comes to a boil over lavish meal

Michael Phillips

A small, clammy film of deep moral and ethical discomfort interrupted by ridiculously swank food, writer-director Oren Moverman's "The Dinner" comes from the 2009 Dutch novel by Herman Koch already adapted for the screen twice: first by writer-director Menno Meyjes, in a 2013 Dutch production, and a year later in a looser Italian-language edition directed by Ivano De Matteo. To say the story's premise travels easily between cultures doesn't mean "The Dinner" is easy material. The new film has a blue-chip cast and a writer-director well suited to the emotional terrain. Why aren't the results more compelling?

Partly, it's a matter of statement vs. overstatement. Koch's premise is a blunt, effective statement of dramatic purpose. In Moverman's film, a psychologically shaky professor of history (Steve Coogan, holding nothing back as Paul) and his suspiciously patient wife, Claire (Laura Linney), agree to have dinner with the history teacher's brother, Stan (Richard Gere), a hotshot U.S. congressman. Rebecca Hall plays his wife, Katelyn, and I truly wish everything in "The Dinner" had the laser impact of Hall's reading of the line: "Pipe down and listen, you APE!"

Like the plays of Yasmina Reza ("Art," "God of Carnage"), seen around the world, Koch's scenario can be seen as ink-black comedy of manners, though the way Moverman directs his script, the ironies and turnabouts tend to clang and clunk. The contrast between insufferably haute cuisine and hypocritical, increasingly appalling justifications for the boys' actions is stark, deliberately so. At the same time, Moverman and his regular cinematographer, the excellent Bobby Bukowski, favor slow zooms and sideways-slipping framing reminiscent of Robert Altman, reflecting the shifting moral stances of everyone implicated in this family matter.

"The Dinner" has precisely the women, Linney and Hall, it needs. They're wizards at the smiling zinger, as they carefully reveal the steel behind the smiles. The men are more problematic: Gere's tetchy exasperation often reads like actorly frustration or boredom, and while Coogan works hard at finding what makes Paul tick, like a time bomb, the effort feels, well, effortful.

Read  full review at Chicago Tribune

Two couples worry about themselves, their kids and, at times, their sanity while being plied with ridiculously styled, ridiculously tiny amounts of food in The Dinner, writer-director Oren Moverman’s U.S.-set adaptation of the bestseller by Dutch author Herman Koch.

A high-carat cast — which includes Richard Gere, Laura Linney and Steve Coogan — tears into the juicy material with relish for the most part, but by trying to keep the prolonged sit-down affair from becoming excessively stagey, Moverman adds too many distracting flashbacks to maintain the original’s hard-hitting and well-aimed gut punch. Still, with a marquee-friendly cast and the novel’s popularity, this Berlinale premiere will probably see some arthouse action both in Europe and stateside before ending up as broadcast fodder for people watching TV with plates of microwaved food on their knees.

As in the novel, the film is divided into chapters named after the courses — aperitif, appetizer, etc. — while the main part of the narrative unfolds in and around the restaurant, which production designer Kelly McGehee has imagined as a sumptuous and isolated villa with many rooms.

Koch’s original novel slowly peeled back the onion-like layers of the seemingly fair and well-behaved bourgeois caste, exploring thorny issues such as class, race, justice and the extent to which obligations parents feel toward their families might supersede these concerns. In the film’s first act, Moverman neatly establishes the original’s caustic and blackly humorous tone as Paul takes aim at everything from his family obligations to the restaurant to his own brother; “You can stop smiling now; it’s just us,” he bitingly says when the Congressman finally sits down after an endless round of handshaking and small talk at other tables at the restaurant.

Just like his previous Richard Gere vehicle Time Out of Mind, Moverman wrote the screenplay solo (he co-wrote his earlier films The Messenger and Rampart). His attempts to Americanize the Netherlands-set novel are largely successful, with especially the political material feeling distinctly local and the Civil War becoming an unexpected (and somewhat awkward) leitmotif.

Coogan hasn’t had a role this juicy in a long time and his facial expressions here are frequently more telling than anything he says, though Paul is not one to censor himself and Coogan’s delivery is always pitch-perfect. Linney’s Claire turns out to be a lioness of a mother — one can almost see her as a better-intentioned but just as fierce cousin of Linney’s monstrous mother in Nocturnal Animals

Moverman and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski take an almost expressionist approach to the visuals, with a lot of the events taking place in a combination of artificial light and dark shadows that often suggest more about the mental state of the characters than the documentary reality in which they live. The soundtrack has been similarly populated with a heterogeneous bunch of songs and heightened sounds that contribute to the frequently unsettling atmosphere, like when the irregular noises of the Congressman’s smartphone and an almost Muzak-like Satie piece intermingle and become the eerie backdrop to a series of halting revelations and reversals.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

Movie Rating ★★★☆☆ 

Steve Coogan startles in this bitter four-hander

Tim Robey

You pay a bigger price for not picking up the cheque,” grumbles misanthropic history teacher Paul (Steve Coogan) in The Dinner, when his wife Claire (Laura Linney) insists they turn up for a scarily chi chi booking. Lo and behold, there's quite some price to pay.

The plot of Herman Koch’s 2009 Dutch novel embroils its quartet of diners in a secret moral referendum, even as oblivious waiters trot to their table with haute-cuisine delicacies. Burnt pumpernickel soil, anyone?

The film, switched to a New York setting by writer-director Oren Moverman, is a bitter consommé with a nasty black fly floating slowly to the surface, though this probably isn’t quite the way the menu would sell it.

A startling Coogan really pushes the boat out as a vitriolic screw-up who loathes his brother: the only thing missing from their Cain-and-Abel spats is for him to trot out his hilarious impression of Gere’s faraway-face from The Trip.

Linney, playing peacemaker at first, does a stealth-Lady-Macbeth routine she’s nailed more vividly in the past, while a tight-lipped Hall, with lacerating moments, watches and waits.

Moverman has made stronger films. His last, Time Out of Mind, got special work from Gere that this can’t match, partly because all the forced, thriller-ish manoeuvres impede his attempts at a thesis. He’s groping splenetically at right-now themes of bourgeois rage and American social injustice: having the brothers debate their family history while perched on the steps of the Gettysburg memorial is, to say the least, throwing subtlety to the wind.

These characters get ghastly fast. It’s the pace and panic of modernity Moverman grasps best as morally corrosive forces: the soft ping of iPhone email alerts never letting us be, and consciences wiped clean as quickly as the next news cycle whips around.

 Read full review at Telegraph