The Dinner
Director: Oren Moverman
Stars: Richard Gere, Steve Coogan
Three stars
As dysfunctional families go, they probably don’t come more issue-laden than the Lohman brothers.
Paul (Steve Coogan) is a history teacher with some challenging mental health problems. Stan (Richard Gere) is a politician destined for great things – if he can lay some ghosts to rest.
To make matters worse, their two sons have just been involved in a shocking crime, although they have yet to be identified by the authorities. And so Paul and Stan, and their long-suffering wives (Laura Linney and Rebecca Hall), gather to talk it through over dinner in a fancy restaurant.
Over the course of the next two hours – neatly divided on screen into courses, from aperitifs to dessert – we see their layers of social respectability peeled away as these couples face up to some lingering childhood and marital issues, and try to figure out how to save themselves and their sons (but mostly themselves) from the gathering storm.
It is rare for a film so bereft of even vaguely-likeable characters to be so watchable. Gere’s high-flying politician would sell his own grandmother to further his career. Coogan’s grouchy teacher initially appears to provide a welcome dose of cynicism in his brother’s world of fake smiles and handshakes, but we soon start to wonder whether his mental health problems are to blame for his obnoxiousness or simply an excuse for it.
The wives, meanwhile, initially appear to be the voice of reason between the quarrelsome brothers, but when their children are threatened it becomes clear that Stan’s Machiavellian self-preservation skills are minimal by comparison.
Based on the international bestselling novel by Dutch author Herman Koch, this movie could easily have fallen into the trap of feeling like a filmed version of a play, but thanks to some crafty camerawork and lots of flashbacks, plus great performances from all four leads to bring the talky script to life, it is very much a piece of cinema rather than theatre.
If anything, the film may suffer from becoming a mirror image of itself. There is a sense to the story that the more these characters talk, the less they actually say – and the film feels as if it is unintentionally the same.
Director Oren Moverman seems determined to cram in so many issues – mental health, distrust of politicians, racial equality, parental guilt, social responsibility, class disparity, corruption, greed, sibling rivalry, globalisation, historical revisionism – that he ultimately seems to say very little about any of them, and certainly fails to shed new light or take an interesting stance.
Perhaps that too is intentional, though – there is nothing wrong with letting the audience draw its own conclusions. You’ll certainly be left thinking about the themes when the credits abruptly roll.
cnewbould@thenational.ae