Reception was largely positive upon initial release, and over time My Dinner with Andre has been regarded as a classic.
Plot
Struggling playwright Wally dreads having dinner with his old friend Andre, whom he has been avoiding since Andre gave up his career as a theater director in 1975 amidst a midlife crisis and embarked on an extended hiatus during which he traveled the world. Wally reflects that as he has aged he has had to focus more on making money than art.
At Café des Artistes in Manhattan, Andre tells Wally about some of the adventures he has had since they last saw each other, which included working with his mentor Jerzy Grotowski and a group of Polish actors in a forest in Poland; traveling to the Sahara while trying to create a play based on The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; and visiting the ecological commune Findhorn in Scotland. The last in this string of events was when Andre and a small group of friends arranged Halloween-themed experiences for each other at an estate in Montauk, including the participants being briefly buried alive.
While Andre says he needed to do all of these things to get out of the rut he was in and learn how to be human, Wally argues that living as Andre has done for the past several years is simply not possible for most people. He describes how he finds pleasure in more ordinary things, like a cup of coffee or his new electric blanket. Andre asserts that focusing too much on comfort can be dangerous, and says that what passes for normal life in New York City is more akin to living in a dream than reality. While Wally agrees with many of Andre's criticisms of modern society, he takes issue with the more mystical aspects of Andre's stories.
After all of the other customers have already left the restaurant, the friends, each having expressed themselves openly and feeling heard by the other, part on good terms. Since Andre paid for dinner, Wally treats himself to a taxi ride, and he notices feeling a deep connection to all of the familiar places he passes on the way home. He narrates that, when he sees his girlfriend, he tells her all about his dinner with Andre.
After spending several years away from the theater, André Gregory was looking to get back into it, so he asked his friend Wallace Shawn if he wanted to do something together. Shawn knew Gregory wanted to tell his story, even working with a biographer at one point, and suggested they develop a story consisting of a conversation between the two of them, with interest coming from their contrasting personalities and Gregory's anecdotes. Having recently acted in his first few films, Shawn saw the project as a film, rather than a play.[3][4]
Although the film was based on events in the actors' lives, Gregory and Shawn denied they were simply playing themselves, and said in an interview with film critic Roger Ebert that, if they were to remake the film, they would swap characters to prove their point. In an interview with Noah Baumbach in 2009, Shawn said:
I actually had a purpose as I was writing this: I wanted to destroy that guy that I played, to the extent that there was any of me there. I wanted to kill that side of myself by making the film, because that guy is totally motivated by fear.[5]
While Shawn and Gregory were trying to find someone to direct the film, Gregory received a phone call, which he initially thought was a prank, from French director Louis Malle, who said he had read a copy of the screenplay he received from a mutual friend and he wanted to direct or produce the film.[3] The writers brought Malle on board, and he worked with them to cut an hour from the three-hour script. Shawn later said that while he had carefully constructed the screenplay and would have preferred to make the longer film, Malle had won most of the arguments, and he credited Malle with infusing the film with a warmth that helped it connect with audiences.[3]
A rehearsal held at a restaurant caused Malle to question whether the setting of the film should be changed, as the eating seemed likely to create problems. Shawn and Gregory tried to think of what else their characters could be doing, but they wound up just having Gregory not eat very much, as he is the one who does most of the talking in the film.[3]
Throughout the film, Andre refers to his wife "Chiquita". In real life, André Gregory was married to Mercedes "Chiquita" Nebelthau until her death in 1992.[11] Nebelthau was a documentary filmmaker whose credits include three films about Gregory's mentor Jerzy Grotowski, whom Andre and Wally discuss in the film.[11]
In the film, Wally refers several times to his "girlfriend Debbie". Wallace Shawn's longtime partner in real life is the short story writer Deborah Eisenberg, who had not yet published anything at the time of the film. Eisenberg makes an appearance early in the film as a dark-haired diner Wally sees as he scans the restaurant while standing at the bar waiting for Andre.[7]
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 92% based on 25 reviews, with an average score of 7.8 out of 10.[14] On Metacritic it has a score of 83 out of 100 based on 15 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[15]
Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel gave high praise to the film on Sneak Previews, support that the producers told Ebert helped keep the film in theaters for a year.[16] Ebert chose it as the best film of 1981, and he and Siskel later ranked it as the fifth-best and fourth-best film, respectively, of the 1980s.[17] In 1999, Ebert added the film to his Great Movies essay series, starting the retrospective review by stating: "Someone asked me the other day if I could name a movie that was entirely devoid of clichés. I thought for a moment, and then answered, My Dinner with Andre."[18]
An Animaniacs segment called "My Dinner with Wakko", from The Ten Short Films of Wakko Warner, where Wakko drinks his Soda while Dr Scratchansniff tells him about his trip to the Mayan Ruins.[citation needed]
The first season of the sitcom Frasier concludes with an episode titled "My Coffee with Niles" (1994), which is loosely based on this film's premise and structure.[21] This film is also directly mentioned in "The Zoo Story" (1998), an episode in the fifth season of the series, when Martin says, mockingly, after he and Niles get their VHS tapes mixed up: "Yeah, well, that's the way Duke and I felt about My Dinner With Andre. Talk about suspense! Will they order dessert? Will they leave a good tip?"[22]
During the end credits of the film Waiting For Guffman (1996), Corky St. Clair is shown displaying his action figures of the characters from this film.[citation needed]
In the Family Guy episode "Brian the Closer" (2014), the family watch "My Dinner With Andre The Giant" on TV.
The opening scene of the first-season episode of Nirvanna the Band the Show entitled "The Buffet" (2017) shows the main character mimicking Wally's actions from the beginning of this film: walking in the city, waiting for a subway, and putting on a tie before entering a restaurant.[24]
Independent film director Maverick Moore parodied both My Dinner with Andre and "the totally bonkers friendship between legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog and controversial actor Klaus Kinski" in his short film My Dinner with Werner (2019).[25]
^Rausch, Andrew J.; Dequina, Michael (February 25, 2008). "Lloyd Kaufman". Fifty Filmmakers: Conversations With Directors from Roger Avary to Steven Zaillian. McFarland. pp. 118–. ISBN9780786484096. Retrieved July 4, 2012 – via Google Books.
^SPIN. September 1987. Retrieved July 4, 2012 – via Google Books.
