Movie of the Week: The Dinner

Alexa: Somewhere in “The Dinner” is a riveting morality tale about the lengths to which parents will go to protect their children. Unfortunately the titular dinner - where four parents meet to figure out how to deal with a crime their sons have committed - is too often interrupted by cumbersome flashbacks. The four main actors all deliver stellar performances, and watching their true selves come to light over the course of the evening makes for tense, intriguing viewing. And the flashbacks certainly serve a purpose in providing some context for the protagonists’ motives and their fractured relationships, but there are too many of them and some drag on far too long. We spend lengthy stretches away from the drama at the restaurant, which ultimately diminishes the impact of those scenes. I think “The Dinner” would almost be more effective as a play with its action more contained. The characters are all flawed people - particularly Steve Coogan’s Paul - but the amount of time we spend with them in flashbacks makes them more insufferable as the movie goes on. And the ending is so frustrating! “The Dinner” has great potential but ultimately prevents itself from achieving it.

Joel: Towards the end of this movie there is a really fantastic scene, maybe scene in a half, where all four of the main characters discuss the fallout of the crime committed by their two sons. It’s a nice bit of acting by all involved. There is a tense back and forth, and it really keeps you invested in the moment. Unfortunately the entire journey to get to that point in the movie is an unbearable uphill slog. The dinner never really happens as the four characters aren’t together at the table for more than a few seconds before one of them gets up and leaves. And when the characters themselves aren’t interrupting the flow of the story by walking out on everyone else, the movie itself is interrupting the story with a non-stop parade of flashbacks that never really feel like they come to a payoff that’s worth the amount of the movie that they take up.

The dinner has a lot of different topics to discover (mental health, cancer, social stigmas against the homeless) but while it addresses that these are all topics that exist in the world it doesn’t feel like it spends enough time on any one thing to actually say something impactful about it. There’s also a really long, frequently recurring focus on the battle of Gettysburg that feels like it’s just there for a “house divided” quote that shows up in the movie. And unfortunately, after that one strong scene is done, the movie descends back to its previous quality concluding with an non-ending that would have been more frustrating if I wasn’t already so checked out by that point anyway.

Chris: This movie just tries to take on too much. The Dinner tries to take on various different issues, often complicated and difficult issues that take careful explanation or plot execution but instead, The Dinner uses abrupt and unexplained time jumps and yelling. I get the metaphor, life is confusing and messy but your movie doesn't have to be like that too. It's a jumbled, unorganized mess and I would like to see how The Dinner would pan out with a different editor or even a different editing approach because there are good, usable moments but there's also a mountain of content in this movie that feels like a waste of time. The biggest waste of time in this movie is anything dealing with Gettysburg and Joel touched on the "house divided" moment that they went for and it really felt like a spoon-fed metaphor that still didn't seem like enough of a pay off. There's a lot of potential within this movie and if a lot of the elements just simplified it to just the dinner itself, maybe the movie would've been a little bit better.

Jason: I was at a loss as to which movie I would pick for this last month of the year. So I threw it to my wife, Emily to pick for me. After watching this movie, she would like to humbly apologize for the pick. I don’t think it was a bad pick, per se. It was just a difficult movie to pick through. Many of the individual scenes felt like they dragged on for way too long before revealing the tiny bit of relevant plot information they contained. And every time you turned around, we were in a different flashback that shines light on a bit of the conversation happening at the titular Dinner table. It all felt jumbled.

This movie had a lot to say about a lot of difficult topics. As the only one of us reviewers who has a child, Emily and I definitely sided with Stan about how the kids’ situation should be handled. Even before it was revealed that they had actually killed the woman, she and I were in agreement that they should have been held accountable for their actions as soon as they had been found out. Yes, it would have had a major impact on their futures and on the family as a whole but they got themselves into that situation but their own hand. They should be made to suffer the consequences. Sweeping their actions under the rug would be enforcing that kind of behavior, telling them that they are above the law, and dehumanizing their victim. It would not teach them anything that could be considered good or moral.

The other thread that I found interesting was mental illness. Throughout the movie, I found myself trying to diagnose Paul. Based on his presenting symptoms, I came up with everything from high-functioning autism to bipolar to schizophrenia. And Michael exhibited a serious lack of empathy, which would most likely be a sign of his own mental illness, whether it was inherited from his father or something completely unrelated. I thought that this, mixed with the moral confusion of it all was an interesting commentary on modern American culture.

And then the thing just ended. Most frustrating ending ever. Two whole hours of build up and exposition, then things start to pick up and then… credits? Again, Emily apologizes and so do I. Great concepts and commentary, some phenomenal acting, and I loved the idea of organizing the movie by course. But overall, this was a mess.