Welcome! Thank you for coming here tonight. Please be seated and enjoy my review. Can I get you anything to start? How about I whet your appetite a little:
Kids! Kids! Come here! Let’s discuss your felonies. On second thought, forget it; we grown-ups are just going figure it out for ourselves. Forget I even mentioned. And such is the dilemma when relatives meet for The Dinner, a lousy screenplay but a great exercise for acting workshops.
The FrogBlog dining experience is a unique adventure replete with tedium and ennui. Have you heard our specials tonight?
The Dinner is divided into chapters entitled “Appetizer,” “Aperitif,” “Cheese Plate,” etc. which is cute, if a tad pretentious. OK, OK, it’s really pretentious. The bottle of wine that gets sent back in the film is expensive enough to feed a family of four in Costa Rica for several years. Precious few of us will be able to relate here … and that’s a good thing.
I see you’ve chosen to skip the starters and go straight to the main course. A wise choice.
In short, the Lohman brothers, Stan & Paul (Richard Gere and Steve Coogan) and their respective wives, Claire & Katelyn (Laura Linney and Rebecca Hall) have selected the diamond cravat club or wherever Yelp gave a $$$$$ rating for dinner. There’s some family tension going on in that Stan is now a congressman and Paul is bipolar. There’s also the tension because a key topic of –eventual- discussion gets a methodical two-hour reveal interspersed between courses. The biggest conflict, however, remains between players and audience as the people on screen apparently do not know how to have dinner in a restaurant – you sit, you order, you receive, you eat/drink, you pay, you leave. NONE of these avenues of restaurant protocol are followed in The Dinner. I repeat, NONE of them. At several points in the film, I felt like throttling the director, “stop having them get up from the table! And stop with the freaking flashbacks! Just have them sit down and talk about what they’re going to talk about.” Richard Gere literally leaves the table at least six times during the film. Steve Coogan leaves the table for a full half hour, the first five minutes of which to look for Luara Linney and Rebecca Hall, who also left the table prematurely.
The meat of the discussion is how these four are going to handle their privilege. The eldest sons of these two couples have done something horrible and are apparently both too young and too white to 
own up to the responsibility of the moment. Hence, the adults eventually get to act at us, and act they do.
Ah, the dessert. Tonight we have two offerings, a mischievous vanilla tort and conclusion a la Frog.
The Dinner is a talking stick film. By this I mean a film where whoever is currently holding the immunity idol or whatever gets to do all the acting and the rest just aggressively watch – oh, Laura Linney, it’s your turn. Start your scene. Rebecca Hall, you’re up next. Steve Coogan, wait your turn, Laura has the idol now. And yes, Richard Gere, just sit in the corner. That’s good. Thanks to flashbacks in several timelines, the presentation of the material was drawn out well beyond the point of need. Also, the nature of the beast yielded nothing but unhappiness, hence, it became near impossible to like any of characters, but yay, acting!
Now who wants coffee?
Four adults meet to get huffed
About why their brats went uncuffed
An extended reveal
Made quite a meal
Two hours of pain, I’m stuffed
Rated R, 120 Minutes
D: Oren Moverman
W: Oren Moverman
Genre: Come for the food; stay for the psychological damage
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Former A-listers looking for tips on how to be a middle-aged actor
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: People who feel
