So first of all you should know that My Dinner with André is a movie, but it will maybe change your life. It shows one man going to dinner, two men having a conversation over dinner, and one man going home from dinner; but in the course of this movie, we are forced to consider what it means to be successful, to be yourself, to be ambitious, and to maybe accept some measure of ambiguity in our lives and in ourselves . . . oh, and also blah blah blah.
On an unrelated note, can I just point out how ridiculous “trust falls” are? It’s on my mind right now because trust falls is a thing that is still happening in the world. That seems kind of weird. Trust falls is that thing where one person walks off a plank backwards and “TRUSTS” that his coworkers (who presumably do not want to be prosecuted for manslaughter) will catch him. I would allege, however, that this is not the way one achieves trust. We trust the people we trust, and the people we trust are the people we know, and the more we know them, the more we trust them. It sounds like a complicated idea (and it is, next to trust falls), but when you see two old friends—two real old friends, like Shawn (who should be familiar to fans of The Princess Bride) and Gregory (who at this point should really only be familiar to fans of this movie, sadly)—getting together to make a movie about a fictional dinner where they talk like their actual selves and consider their actual lives (fictionally), you remember what it’s like to believe in people. And you learn to trust that even when old friends lie to you (or fib, or fudge), they still can’t help but tell the truth. In that spirit, let me now say to André, my new old friend: André, you crazy.
When Harry Met Sally . . . is a movie that we kind of take for granted now. Everyone knows the “I’ll have what she’s having” scene, and a lot of people even know that director Rob Reiner’s mom was the woman who delivered that very same line, but what gets lost in the film’s luster is the fact that it created the romantic comedy as we know it today. Not in terms of the formula (which goes back to Jane Austen, if not earlier), but in terms of the themes, the terms, and even the conversations. It was the movie that gave us the “men and women can’t be friends” speech in its modern form; the archetypal “women fake it” monologue; the idea of being a “high-maintenance” person; and the possibility of just having a “transitional” sig-oth (oh, and also, the Harry Connick Jr.–soaked ’90s rom-com soundtrack). But it didn’t establish all these new tropes because it was intent on doing something new, but rather because it was intent on doing something that was familiar enough to be pleasant and still good enough to be true. And now, like all classics, it feels like it’s been around forever—and it sort of has.
The Philadelphia Story is the impossibly charming film adaptation of a stage play by Philip Barry. It takes place at a Philadelphia country estate, where three people love Tracy Lord (played by Katharine Hepburn), but only one can marry her. Two of those people are Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, and the third person is engaged to Mrs. Lord, so that is a problem. That problem is what drives the plot. But it’s the lines that make the movie.
Philip Barry, the playwright, is now largely forgotten, but that’s too bad because his play is just about the best thing ever. The lines he wrote were lovely, and the characters were deep. Luckily, though, in the film adaptation those lines were, if anything, improved by the performances of Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Ruth Hussey, and James Stewart, who—I swear to
James Stewart—turns each and every one of his lines into music. The movie as a whole sticks in your ear like a pop song, but this is not a guilty pleasure. There is so much happening in each line of dialogue, that when someone finally does say something direct and simple—something like “You’re wonderful,” for instance—it sounds like “I love you” is supposed to sound. It sounds like it matters. Watch it and learn what love sounds like. (But watch out: You won’t know what Tracy Lord’s true love looks like until the end.)
In an early scene from Out of Sight, federal marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) stumbles across Jack Foley (George Clooney) and a couple of his pals during a jail break, and when the getaway car arrives she and Clooney eventually wind up in the trunk together (that is not a euphemism). Normally that would be the end of that—cut to the next scene; but in Out of Sight what follows is nearly three minutes of what very quickly becomes almost pillow talk: Karen explains why she’s not acting afraid; Jack butchers a line from the movie Network, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take—I’m not gonna take any more of your shit!” and struggles to grasp a reference to Clyde Barrow; and right before the trunk opens, they seem to find a common ground in Three Days of the Condor (“the one with Robert Redford when he was young.”) Out of Sight, for its part, is the one with George Clooney before he was a film star and Jennifer Lopez before she was J-Lo. Detroit has never looked better (or bluer), Miami has never looked hotter (or redder), and Elmore Leonard’s dialogue has never sounded smarter or sexier than it does here, under Steven Soderbergh’s direction. “Cool” looked pretty weird in the ’90s, but here ’90s cool actually makes some sense.
Oh, also, keep an eye out for Don Cheadle. (Because he’ll keep an eye out for you.)
I suppose it’s a little strange to think of a rap battle as being a kind of long-form “conversation,” but at the same time, if you have two people who are listening closely to each other and responding at length with not only words, but also music, what is that if not conversation-plus? And in the case of Jay-Z vs. Nas, this was not just a matter of name-calling. It began after the death of the Notorious B.I.G.—who both men knew, and who had previously been regarded as the best rapper alive—with a bunch of vague allusions and perceived insults, but by the time Nas released “Ether” in response to Jay-Z’s “Takeover,” pretty much all of the cards were all on the table. The rivalry was obscene and at times vicious, so it may not have been the most functional or the most productive conversation in the end, but it concluded with everyone friends again (and now business partners as well) and with New York once again at the center of the hip-hop world.
The Coen brothers have always known how to write some of that sweet dialogue. Whether they’re writing for mild-mannered Minnesotans (as in Fargo) or Wild Westerners (True Grit) or casual Californians (The Big Lebowski), these two bros never fail to account for the little tics that separate the dude-ers from the dontchaknow-ists. Their dialogue is also famous for its hiccups—its “ums” and “likes” and pauses, and in both instances their affinity for realism really does help to show us something that a lot of movies fail to identify: namely, the influence of where we come from, in both what we say and who we are. Those little verbal gestures are a lot more than simple background noise; instead, they show us as we are when we’re not paying attention.
But the little differences that separate region from region and personality from personality have nothing on the separation between the slang of today and the slang of yesterday; so it’s not surprising that the past is where the Coen brothers find their ripest terrain. In Miller’s Crossing, they borrow heavily from the Jazz Age, but which is also thoroughly modern, and what they come up with is a movie that is not a period piece, not a mystery, and not a noir, but is instead a movie that—like all of their best films—reflects on the ways that our language affects our behavior. A movie about our “etics,” in other words.
Bridesmaids is a movie that contains multitudes. Some of its scenes are straight out of SNL (where Kristen Wiig had made her name), others were plugged in for their gross-out comedy factor, and as the movie nears its end, a smallish subplot takes over and resolves the movie as though it had been a romantic comedy all along. But it all kind of works because even though Kristen Wiig’s character is hilariously inept at coping with her friend’s upcoming marriage, the movie as a whole is, like a good (and more stable) friend, incredibly open to whatever its characters want to do—or simply can’t help themselves from doing. That spirit of generosity pervades the movie, and it’s never more apparent than in the opening conversation between real-life friends Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph. It sounds like real human friends, but it takes place in a movie, and it stars women. And it has perhaps the best penis impression ever committed to film. It is a Hollywood miracle.
With the exception of its quotes from comic books (The Fantastic Four and Watchmen, most notably), there’s hardly a single set of quotation marks in all of Oscar Wao. This isn’t that exceptional—James Joyce used dashes and italics because he abhorred inverted commas, and lots of other authors have found their way around them, too—but in this case the decision to avoid them is especially poignant. Oscar, the character at the center of the novel, is a character who is surrounded by words. Everyone else is always talking, telling stories, and their conversations inform his life. But he finds himself more and more closed off as he grows up and appears to us from a distance, reading, thinking, pining away, and making plans. When Oscar does act though, he has an impact. His actions led, ostensibly, to the novel, after all. And that’s the risk and promise that our actions carry: They can turn back into words, and carry on.
Aaron Sorkin is the man who writes the dialogue that you can’t help but notice (or enjoy). He’s the man behind A Few Good Men (“You can’t handle the truth!”), The West Wing (and a thousand righteous right jabs), Sports Night, The American President, Moneyball, and The Newsroom. His dialogue gets so much play that there is even a mash-up video that shows “Sorkinisms” repeated time and time again within his body of work. It contains phrases and expressions (such as “You’re really quite something,” “That was predictable,” and “Not for nothin’”) that he may have had the tendency to overuse a bit (“Ya think!?”), but even so, he’s also the man who writes the bits of conversation that would otherwise never have been written at all, because no one writes those in-between moments better than he does. And The Social Network offers a great example of Sorkin in that role.
David Fincher’s movie is about Facebook and the consequences of greed, ambition, and power. But since it involves a lot of young people, and since young people talk a lot, Aaron Sorkin was hired to inject some life into the script. That “life” is evident—as is “that Sorkin”— from the very first scene, where Rooney Mara, as Mark Zuckerberg/Jesse Eisenberg’s soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, keeps pace with him on several different conversational tracks at the same time. They all matter, and they’re all juvenile, and they’re all totally compelling. And sometimes that’s the whole idea. When people talk, you want to make the audience care. That’s what Sorkin does.
Death Proof is Quentin Tarantino’s ode to ’70s car-chase movies and exploitation cinema. It’s about a man named “Stunt Man” Mike and the two groups of friends that he seeks to murder with his “death proof” car. It’s a chase movie with one of the all-time great chases, but the action is overshadowed by the talking, because the talking was written by Quentin Tarantino and talked by one of the coolest casts ever assembled. It included, among others, Sydney Tamiia Poitier (aka “a girl named Sydney Poitier”), Tracie Thoms (Tracie Thoms!), Rosario Dawson (who grew up in a Lower East Side tenement building and today works with the Lower East Side Girls Club), and Zoe Bell (a real-life stunt woman and, I think, a human cat).
The film is split into two parts: In the first part, three young female friends (Arlene, Shanna, and “Jungle” Julia—a local DJ) drive around Austin, talking; talk and drink at a local bar; and then drive home, talking and listening to music—at which point “Stunt Man” Mike plows into them at high velocity and kills them all, but is himself mostly unharmed. In the second half of the movie, three young female friends (Abernathy, Kim, and Lee) drive around Tennessee, talking; pick up their friend Zoe; take an iconic car out for a “test drive,” and then engage in an epic off-road chase with “Stunt Man” Mike, which ends with Mike being beaten to a pulp in the middle of the road.
The chase and the action at the end of the movie give the film its raison d’être, but they are not the point. The point is that Jungle Julia wants to hear “Hold Tight,” by Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich, when she rides home from the bar; the point is that Arlene didn’t do “the thing,” and that Zoe fell into the ditch that Kim had told her about, but that even so, she “practically landed on her feet.” The point is that they are alive, and the way they speak to each other shows who they are and what they believe—which is why the movie, as a chase movie, is so good. If you don’t really want to hear what someone has to say when they get out of a car, it doesn’t matter as much whether or not they ever do get out. And if you do care, it does matter. A lot. We root for these ladies to win their fight against “Stunt Man” Mike not just because he is an evil murderer and they are some awesome friends, but also because we want to hear them finish their stories. (And finish Mike’s, too.)