Having recently viewed My Dinner with Andre for the third time and having read most of the reviews on this site, I am struck that there is no film in history that better illustrates (Roger) Ebert's Law (and forgive me as I am here quoting from memory): "A movie is not about what it is about but rather how it is about it."
This concept bears consideration when people get deeply involved in arguments as to which of the characters is "correct" or "happier." The creators of this masterpiece have, quite intentionally, left the answer to those questions, and the attendant judgments, out of the film. To make such judgments in this work would largely invalidate the dynamic the creators have worked so hard to achieve. That dynamic is the complex and plastic (in the traditional sense) nature of conversation.
It is a film which illustrates the strength of oral history as a process of give-and-take. Just when the views of the characters seem most polarized, they again find common ground and when one makes a point with which he's sure the other will agree, he sometimes finds that he has lost the complicity of his conversational partner. This mirrors not only conversation, but human interaction in a broader sense.
To this extent, it doesn't matter if Wally and Andre are discussing metaphysics or NASCAR racing. While I grant that their topics are on the whole interesting to an audience likely to appreciate this type of film, I think that the subject matter is more a device than crucial plot point. The subject(s) of the conversation serve to draw the audience into the creators' reality, but what it learns there has little to do with what is being discussed.
Rather, we the audience learn how these characters interact. We see their impassioned agreement, their learning, their subtle and not-so-subtle challenges to one another, and, in all these things, we see a score of interactions that we have had with a score of acquaintances, and in this lies the film's brilliance.
This concept bears consideration when people get deeply involved in arguments as to which of the characters is "correct" or "happier." The creators of this masterpiece have, quite intentionally, left the answer to those questions, and the attendant judgments, out of the film. To make such judgments in this work would largely invalidate the dynamic the creators have worked so hard to achieve. That dynamic is the complex and plastic (in the traditional sense) nature of conversation.
It is a film which illustrates the strength of oral history as a process of give-and-take. Just when the views of the characters seem most polarized, they again find common ground and when one makes a point with which he's sure the other will agree, he sometimes finds that he has lost the complicity of his conversational partner. This mirrors not only conversation, but human interaction in a broader sense.
To this extent, it doesn't matter if Wally and Andre are discussing metaphysics or NASCAR racing. While I grant that their topics are on the whole interesting to an audience likely to appreciate this type of film, I think that the subject matter is more a device than crucial plot point. The subject(s) of the conversation serve to draw the audience into the creators' reality, but what it learns there has little to do with what is being discussed.
Rather, we the audience learn how these characters interact. We see their impassioned agreement, their learning, their subtle and not-so-subtle challenges to one another, and, in all these things, we see a score of interactions that we have had with a score of acquaintances, and in this lies the film's brilliance.
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