Oren Moverman’s The Dinner: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child

Some years back the filmmaker Oren Moverman was taking meetings with Cate Blanchett, one of the Bob Dylan incarnations in I’m Not There, the 2007 movie he scripted with director Todd Haynes. The actress wanted to direct a film and chose Herman Koch’s 2009 novel, The Dinner, asking Moverman to adapt it for the screen. As these things happen, the directing job fell to Moverman. He had been working with Richard Gere on Time Out of Mind, which he directed, and the movie Norman, which he produced. In The Dinner, Richard Gere plays Stan Lohman, a politician, who has his brother Paul (Steve Coogan) and their wives, Rebecca Hall and Laura Linney to dinner at a restaurant so fancy, the waiters parade the food to the table, each precious plate explained by provenance and preparation.

You might think this set-up to be a comedy; it is anything but. Stan wants to have a serious family meeting regarding their teenage sons who have committed a horrific crime, setting fire to a homeless woman. Conjuring themes of entitlement, indulgent parenting, “affluenza,” race, class, a moral debate ensues, with each adult responding to this act and how the young men should be punished, or not. As one mother put it, “They are only children.”

On opening night at the Tribeca Film Festival, guests were still pondering how they would respond faced with these circumstances as they filed out of the theater. None of the stars made it to the after party at White Street except Chloe Sevigny who plays an ex-wife who ran off to join an ashram, and the young actors, deeply engaged in a conversation with Ben Stiller. A further act of violence threatens at the film’s end that some feel was unresolved. But that’s just a distraction from the central no-win dilemma of how the boys will find redemption. In whatever way, that the question is posed so forcefully in this suspenseful, edgy film is its triumph.

Regina Weinreich

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