BEFORE: Well, this just makes sense, to follow two movies about eating with another one. And Steve Coogan carries over from "The Trip to Spain". Before watching this film, I'm going to watch another short, "The Gruffalo's Child", which is the sequel to yesterday's short, "The Gruffalo". It doesn't link to this one, but it does have Rob Brydon's voice in it again, and watching it (plus tonight's feature) helps gets my Netflix list down from 90 to 86. A lot more progress still needs to be made, though.
THE PLOT: Two sets of wealthy parents meet for dinner to decide what to do about a crime their sons have committed.
AFTER: OK, so I didn't know anything about this film going in, except that it was probably about some people eating dinner. I know, crazy, right? And then the film spends its first hour pretending that it's just a film about four people eating dinner, but hinting that perhaps there's something going on, namely the REASON for the dinner. But before getting there, while spending an hour avoiding getting there, it does seem to be a movie about the dinner. But it's not about the dinner.
So why present it in a manner similar to a film like "Big Night", with close-ups of delicious food and lengthy verbal descriptions about the courses, made with a sprinkling of this and a light coating of that? For that matter, why describe the food at all, don't the diners know what they ordered? Hey, wait, there were NO MENUS! What kind of a weird restaurant is this, where the chef (or the waiter) decides what each guest eats? What if somebody has a food allergy or something, what happens then?
OK, I'm kidding, but just a little bit. I know there are some REALLY upscale restaurants, the kind I don't get to go to, that might have "tasting menus" or some such thing, where you're so lucky to get a reservation there after waiting six months or pulling some strings that you probably do have to eat whatever the chef feels like cooking for you, and if he decides that all the men should eat THIS item, and all the women should eat THAT, then that's up to him. But it's still weird in a movie to see people have to listen to the head waiter describe everything being served (that they didn't necessarily order) in great detail. Except for the cheese course, that makes sense, people like to know more about each cheese and where it's from. But on the whole it kind of feels more like the auteur film director didn't understand how restaurants work, that he was afraid the menus would block the actors' faces or perhaps the writer forgot to write dialogue where the customers ordered their food. And then perhaps nobody was in a position to correct the writer or director on this point, that seems likely somehow.
Then we start to see various flashbacks during the dinner, ones that hint of the story details to come - yep, it's another one of those "You assemble it yourself..." movies, where the director throws a bunch of things at the audience and we have to try to piece everything together. The great danger with these is that viewers may connect some of the dots in the wrong way, and after making certain assumptions, it's difficult to get back on track to a story that makes sense. For example, Stan was seen in the flashbacks with a different wife, so I made the natural assumption that he'd gotten divorced (or widowed) at some point, and married another woman, all that is fine. But then Paul made a reference to his wife "dying" from smoking cigarettes, so naturally I also made the assumption that Claire wasn't his son's mother, but his stepmother, and that was just incorrect. Apparently "dying" was used in the present tense and not the past tense, and she had the kind of lung cancer that you recover from? Any way you slice it, this was confusing, perhaps not intentional, but then why bring up her illness at all, and not show her in the flashbacks?
The whole incident with the basketball and the broken window seemed like a strange aside, it didn't really bring anything to the table in terms of establishing a history for Paul and his son, except maybe to show that he tried to bring him up with a moral code, and somehow he failed, possibly due to his own mental illness. But I think that's a bit of a stretch - the simpler explanation is to imagine that this was supposed to connect to the main story somehow, and the director forgot to do that, or couldn't figure out how to do that.
Which brings me to Paul's mental illness, which is never given a name, or explained very well for that matter. He's wary of a recurrence of what happened at Gettysburg - not the famous battle, but apparently something that happened to him or some way in which he reacted while visiting the famous historical Civil War site with his brother. Even when they showed us the flashback of this visit, it brought me no understanding about his condition or what happened there, it's just another thing that refuses to connect with anything else in a meaningful way. (By an astonishing coincidence, however, I watched this film on July 2, and the Battle of Gettysburg took place July 1-3 in 1863.)
Finally - after MANY trips to the restroom, going outside for smokes or a breath of fresh air, and other delays that probably TOTALLY would have messed up the service of the courses in this ultra-fancy restaurant and pissed off all of the waiters - I mean, seriously, when's the last time you went to a restaurant and 75% of the people in your party went outside for, like, half an hour, waited for their kid to arrive so they could switch phones, spent way too long in the restroom, sat on the weird staircase to nowhere for a while, had some smokes, etc. - I'm genuinely surprised this restaurant didn't give their table away! If it's SO expensive to eat there, why wouldn't you want to spend every possible second at the table and really get your money's worth?
Finally - FINALLY they all start discussing the reason for the dinner, which ties in with some (but not all) of the flashbacks. I'm not going to reveal it here, because it is sort of the reason for all of the drama, and NOT the mental illness bill that Stan's trying to push through Congress, and it's NOT the basketball that broke the window in the smoke shop, and it's NOT the racial implications of adopting a kid from Africa and raising him in a white family with your second wife. Maddeningly, it's none of those things, but it is serious business. This isn't like the dinner you'd eat while driving through Italy or Spain, but finally maybe we can understand why Paul is being so rude to the wait-staff.
But the one thing it does share with last night's film is that they both have enigmatic, confusing, write-your-own-ending sort of conclusions. I had to run this film's closing minute back and watch it a few times, because there seems to be a lot going on, it's just too bad that none of it makes any sense. And that's all I have to say about that. If you can figure out the details about what happened at the end, please fill me in.
Looking at some of the other reviews on the IMDB, I'm not the only one that noticed that during the final conversations at the restaurant, the Apple "alert" sound (as if someone in the party had just received an e-mail or text message) was played constantly, at regular intervals, and this was quite annoying. I had convinced myself that maybe I misheard it, or it was part of the ambient music being played in the restaurant lounge. But nope, that was it - now these were busy people, maybe it's part of the story that someone in the dining party was receiving alerts on a constant basis, but that's still no excuse. You just don't make that part of the movie, it's very annoying.
Anyway, the whole thing doesn't make much sense because you just don't go to a restaurant to discuss in a public place something that you're trying to keep private. Once the topic is finally revealed, these four people end up yelling at each other about the very thing that they're trying to keep people from finding out about - so that's a whole bunch of fail right there. If even one person in that restaurant works for a newspaper, the jig is up.
Also starring Richard Gere (last seen in "Dr. T & the Women"), Laura Linney (last seen in "You Can Count on Me"), Rebecca Hall (last seen in "The Gift"), Chloe Sevigny (last seen in "Lovelace"), Charlie Plummer (last seen in "Not Fade Away"), Adepero Oduye (last seen in "The Big Short"), Taylor Rae Almonte, Joel Bissonnette (last seen in "Zodiac"), Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick (last seen in "Pawn Sacrifice"), Miles J. Harvey, Laura Hajek, Michael Chernus (last seen in "Winter Passing"), and the voice of Stephen Lang (last seen in "The Hard Way").
RATING: 3 out of 10 charred leeks
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