Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

The Dinner Blu-ray Movie Review

Brother v. Brother

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 5, 2017

There’s a moment fairly early on in The Dinner when Paul Lohman (Steve Coogan) and his wife Claire (Laura Linney) have arrived early at the toniest restaurant imaginable, a place that’s impossible to get into, unless of course you’re Paul’s brother Stan (Richard Gere), a congressman who’s running for governor. Stan (who arranged the meal and invited Paul and Claire) and his wife Katelyn (Rebecca Hall) haven’t arrived yet, so Paul and Claire are being gastronomically entertained by an officious maître d' who is informing the couple of all the gourmet ins and outs of the appetizers he’s providing to them. One hopes it’s an intentional bit of irony provided by screenwriter Oren Moverman that this sycophant with garden vegetables mispronounces my home state of Oregon (where a rosemary infused item hails from), which as any Oregonian will tell you is properly pronounced “Orygun” (an actual popular bumper sticker in these parts). The maître d' goes for “Ore-a-GONE”, a popular but still incorrect way of saying the state's name, but a mispronunciation that for Oregonians at least will expose a bit of the pretense at this supposedly higher than high class establishment, pretense that Paul himself is only too aware of and has already been snarkily commenting on (he disappointingly lets the “Oregon” mispronunciation slide). There is a veritable ton of subtext in The Dinner, part of which can be attributed to a deliberately discursive structure which ping pongs back and forth between various characters and timelines, and only slowly divulges what’s really going on. On one level, the film would seem to be a rather odd mash up of elements from My Dinner with Andre, with characters engaged in a seemingly arbitrary set of conversations at an upscale restaurant, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with two sets of couples gathered for an ostensible social interaction which soon devolves into an increasingly tense power struggle. But there are still other elements at play in The Dinner, as alluded to in initially confusing but ultimately clarified interstitials dealing with both couples’ kids, who are seen at a party in the film’s opening moments. Based on a bestselling novel by Dutch author Herman Koch (which has already received two previous foreign language film adaptations), The Dinner is a fascinating viewing experience, even if it turns out that some of its calories are on the empty side.

The opening moments of The Dinner are intentionally chaotic, with the crazy teen party scene intercut with voiceover from Paul kind of weirdly referencing historical events. When the first real dialogue scene arrives, it’s another kind of odd interchange between Paul and Claire, where Paul seems positively agoraphobic and insistent that he does not want to dine with “apes”. It hasn’t yet been revealed that Paul and Claire are destined to dine with Paul’s brother and his wife, but this first conversation is a hint that Paul may be at the very least neurotic (and maybe even further down the mental illness trail than that). Claire comes off as a solid, grounded and nurturing presence, something that will be played on quite effectively much later in the film with regard to the couple’s son, Michael (Charlie Plummer), one of the teens seen in the seemingly unrelated party sequence.

Once the quartet arrives at the restaurant, things begin getting more anxiety filled, with what seems like a long festering sibling rivalry between Paul and Stan fueling the discourse. Stan, who’s evidently trying to shepherd a bill through the House of Representatives, keeps getting called away from the table by his aide Nina (Adepero Oduye), something that obviously chafes against both Paul’s and Katelyn’s sensibilities. An early private interchange between Stan and Nina reveals that there’s an ulterior motive for Stan having arranged this sit down, something that has to do with an as yet undisclosed “private family matter”. Suddenly, those teen party interstitials involving Michael and Stan’s sons (one of whom is an adopted African American boy) augurs something troubling.

One of the funniest things in the great Christopher Guest send up of community theater, Waiting for Guffman, is Corky St. Clair hawking his “My Dinner With Andre action figures”, an obvious (if hilarious) swipe at that film’s lack of action. Perhaps with that film’s static quality in mind, The Dinner repeatedly cuts away from the restaurant gathering to detail both longstanding family dramas as well as to further elucidate what happened the night the couples’ kids attended a party together. This gives the film a disjointed feeling and tends to interrupt momentum, but it also tends to provide substance to the characters, slowly but surely revealing events that have led them to their current states of dysfunction.

Without spoiling what is a horrendous mistake on the part of the boys, it becomes evident that the dinner has been arranged as a sort of crisis intervention, one that Stan feels strongly needs to be addressed, especially since he’s running for office, while Katelyn, the very model of a modern trophy wife, and Claire, who is the very model of a woman completely in the throes of a delusional denial, want to tuck away where it will never be mentioned again. The second half of the film is an often incisive analysis of how parents tend to react to children misbehaving or in fact indulging in criminal activity, and it’s notable that The Dinner provides grist for the mill on both sides of this particular argument without ever revealing what the parents decide to do about the situation. Instead, the real emphasis here is on the parental units themselves, rather than this particular decision, and while that may seem counterintuitive, it works surprisingly well, especially in an absolutely riveting final sequence that seems to suggest Paul may be more seriously unbalanced than even his surface eccentricities would suggest.

The film benefits from some pitch perfect performances. It’s nice to see Gere in a conflicted but generally honorable characterization as Stan, a guy with big ambitions but one who actually wants to do the right thing. Coogan, who has made much of his reputation in more comedically oriented roles, is sharp and disturbing as Paul. The unforgettable performance in this film belongs to Linney, however, and an incredible late scene involving her phoning home to check on Michael is a textbook case of brilliant film acting.

This is now the third film in a row that I’ve reviewed where I’m not sure if the literary ambitions of the source novel comfortably translate to the cinematic realm. Chief among these artificies is the conceit of splitting the film into “courses”, which in and of itself is kind of a non sequitur given the fact that the film darts to and from the restaurant both spatially and temporally at any given moment. But even the emphasis on Paul’s obsession with Gettysburg seems disconnected from the main narrative, unless one wants to see the Civil War as a metaphor for a really intense form of sibling rivalry. The subtext that Paul may have passed down a certain mental imbalance to Michael is also left as an allusion more than a developed plot point. Despite these potential shortcomings, the film delivers on both emotional and perhaps especially moral grounds, exposing the traumas experienced by a quartet who can’t even decide what the right thing to do is, let alone doing it.

The Dinner Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Dinner is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. Once again technical data on the shoot is well nigh impossible to find online (at least it was for me), and as can be seen in the screenshots accompanying this review, the imagery is often tweaked one way or the other, often quite aggressively, making its source perhaps less important than it might otherwise be. The film was lensed by Bobby Bukowski, who has collaborated with Oren Moverman on some previous projects. The film varies in a number of techniques, with the main restaurant scenes drenched in golden ambers and deep (almost hellish) reds, while a number of the flashbacks have pushed brightness and what I assume is intentionally toned down contrast. A number of the scenes involving the kids after the party have a number of other grading techniques employed. At times this presentation has the sleek and glossy appearance of digital capture (see screenshot 4), while at other times there's a gritty texture that looks more like traditional film. Bukowski uses subtle but effulgent light sources quite a bit of the time, lending a soft, gauzy ambience to a lot of the restaurant material. I can't state definitively whether some anomalies are intentional stylistic gambits or capture and/or compression issues, but there are occasional splotchy moments that approach pixellation (look at screenshot 17 for one example). With an acceptance that this is an unusually heterogeneous looking film, general detail levels are typically very good, and close-ups offer some excellent fine detail levels.

The Dinner Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Dinner is a dialogue driven piece, and much of that dialogue takes place in confined places, so the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix doesn't have a whale of a lot of opportunity to exploit "wow" sonics. Still, there's routine directionality even in the restaurant scenes, and some good ambient environmental placement in the surround channels when the film ventures out of doors in several flashback scenes. Dialogue is rendered without any issues, and fidelity is fine across the board.

The Dinner Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Director Oren Moverman and Actress Laura Linney


• Photo Gallery (1080p)

The Dinner Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Dinner may in fact leave you wanting a little bit more to "eat", especially since it ends almost mid-sentence without any clear resolution of the central issue at hand. The film may not be completely successful, and it probably darts to and fro too much for its own good, but it's graced by some sensational performances and some extremely smart writing. This has made me extremely eager to see the two previous adaptations of the source novel, and I'm going to set out to track those down as soon as possible. The video presentation here is odd at times, but I'm frankly uncertain as to whether some of the oddities were intentional. Recommended.