Review: "My Dinner with Andre" (1982) & "Vanya on 42nd Street" (1994)

There are, of course, a multitude of NYC movies but none are as intimate, as personal, and as wholly originally as My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street. Both were the brainchildren of actor/writer Wallace Shawn, experimental theater director/actor Andre Gregory, and the late French movie director Louis Malle. 

My Dinner with Andre is about two old friends discussing the nature of life, experience, and happiness. It stars Shawn and Gregory playing barely fictionalized versions of themselves sharing a meal at the Cafe des Artistes. There's no plot, the movie is pure dialogue, but it completely holds your attention. Meeting after a number of years, Gregory tells Shawn about how he has just returned from spending years in Poland and other places in Europe, engaging in all sorts of weird, bizarre theater, and having amazing, life-changing experiences. He proclaims that going out into the world, into the wild, embracing life in all its craziness, is the only way to live -- and that most people live meaningless lives of quiet deseperation. Shawn disagrees. He believes that there is much joy and experience and wisdom to be gained from the daily routines of life, that living a pleasant life is enough (there's great happiness to be found in a cup of coffee, for example), and that it'd be impossible for most people to live as Gregory does. Disguised as a simple film of two people eating and talking about their livevs, it's actually a great existentialist and philosophical debate about human happiness. Deep -- but not at all pretentious. And I, for one, am someone who believes that two people sharing a meal can be a fascinating setting for a film. 

A decade later, Shawn, Gregory, and Malle reteamed to make Vanya on 42nd Street. Again, it's a very simple premise that is much more than the sum of its parts -- the movie involves a group of actors, including a young Julianne Moore, performing Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekov. They perform it without sets, costumes, or props on the stage of the then-decaying New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street, in front of a small audience under Gregory's stage direction (a few years later this theater was bought by Disney and remodeled into a glistening jewel). Because of the bare bones minimalism of the production, you go head-first into the story and dialogue and characters, you are absorbed into the world of Chekov's miserable 19th century Russian professor and his gorgeous second wife. The acting is powerful, great talents at the top of their game, and the emotion and sadness of the story hits the viewer hard. It's an extraordinary theatrical and cinematic experience, something almost no other film has ever achieved.

Louis Malle directed many films over his career and Vanya was his last one before his death. Shawn, of course, has had a wildly successful career in movies and television, and Gregory continues to direct and act in theater and sometimes in film. Both movies probably couldn't get made today and even though both films profoundly examine the timeless aspects of human nature, both are also snapshots in time -- a meal, a performance, the early-1980s, the mid-1990s -- that the somehow manage to encompass the totality of human experience in a timeless way.

I highly recommend both movies, particularly in these times when humanity feels more under assault than ever.