5.8 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
A look at how far parents will go to protect their children. Feature film based on a novel by Herman Koch.
Starring: Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Steve Coogan, Rebecca Hall, Chloë SevignyThriller | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Mystery | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English SDH, Spanish
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
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 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 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 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.
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