'Dinner' conversation rings true

In the intimate Dinner With Friends, HBO explores an old subject - divorce - with an honesty that's rare in today's movies.

By ERIC DEGGANS

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 10, 2001

If you've never been married, HBO's newest film, Dinner With Friends, might seem pretty predictable fare.

One married couple, stable and loving, learns that their best friends -- another married couple -- are divorcing. The husband has found another love and has chosen to leave his wife and two children. The four friends' relationship unravels, as all involved struggle to cope with the breakup.

As TV movie subjects go, it's hardly new. Still, for those who have walked down an aisle and stepped into the world of matrimony, Dinner With Friends bears the taste of bitter truth.

The quiet desperation and dysfunctional communication that often kill relationships. The anger and judgmental reaction of friends who rarely know all the facts. The discomfort and often unspoken fear that a divorce can bring to married friends, summed up in a single question:

Could we be next?

"This movie is a mirror to marriage and married life and friendship," said Dennis Quaid. He plays food critic Gabe, married to fellow "foodie" Karen (Four Weddings and a Funeral's Andie MacDowell) -- the couple left standing as their friends' relationship self-destructs. "People change. The relationship changes. And, sometimes, people don't notice that it's changing, or they try to keep things the same way."

Quaid waved off notions that his own recent marital woes may have fueled his performance, saying, "I didn't go into this thinking, "Oh well, I just had a divorce, so I have to do this role.' "

Still, there's no denying the extra electricity that comes from watching Quaid and MacDowell, knowing that both have endured high-profile divorces.

Quaid's split with actor Meg Ryan was final in May, ending a 13-year relationship that produced a son. MacDowell's union to model-contractor Paul Qualley concluded in 1999 after three children and 13 years. (The famously down-to-earth actor plans to marry a former high school classmate in November.)

And though MacDowell noted that she has played lots of women in troubled marriages over the years -- "I mean, (my) sex, lies and videotape (character) was done quite a long time ago, and she had some major problems," the actor confided with a laugh -- it's plain she understands the forces buffeting both couples.

"The thing that has happened to this particular couple is they've gotten so busy with their kids and their lives and their jobs and everything," MacDowell said, facing TV critics in California last month with Quaid, co-star Greg Kinnear and director Norman Jewison.

"You have to really work at keeping whatever it was that you had in the very beginning alive through all of that, through paying the bills and raising the kids and all of that," she said. "And it doesn't always happen."

Dinner With Friends sets the story of this struggle in a yuppie paradise: the urbane world of successful fortysomething food critics Gabe and Karen (the movie opens with a montage that shows Gabe discussing an upcoming Gourmet magazine cover with the publication's actual editor, Ruth Reichl).

The critics have invited their closest friends, Tom (Kinnear) and Beth (Aussie actor Toni Collette) over for an elaborate dinner based on recipes gleaned during a recent trip to Italy. Beth shows up with the two kids but without Tom, then tearfully reveals that Tom is leaving her, convinced after a dozen years of marriage that his life as a husband and father is a lie.

Tom later tries to plead his case to Gabe and Karen, aware that he looks like a jerk but convinced that his marriage is over and he had to act. (One of the film's running jokes is that everyone but Tom keeps calling his travel agent girlfriend a stewardess; this small act of denial speaks volumes.)

Complicating things further: Gabe and Karen introduced Tom and Beth during a weekend on Martha's Vineyard in 1988. In a particularly effective device, a flashback to that weekend is suffused with a bright, amber glow, evoking the honeyed spirit of treasured memories.

After Beth's revelation, Gabe can't help defending his old pal Tom to Karen, who furiously defends her old friend Beth. Both also can't help feeling a little betrayed and afraid.

By the movie's end, Gabe and Karen have come to some uncomfortable conclusions about their friendship with Tom and Beth, aided by an 11th-hour discovery that changes much about how we see both couples.

"This piece really deals with questions from both sides," said Kinnear, who continues his transformation from snarky Talk Soup host to gifted dramatic actor. "(Writer Donald Margulies) keeps making you be very judgmental about people and . . . turns them around and throws them upside down (to) leave you more confused than when you started."

Jewison (Moonstruck, The Hurricane) and HBO's press releases have made much of the long scenes that fill this film. Unlike so many movies -- often pieced-together pastiches of brief moments filmed over hours of effort -- Dinner With Friends offers long bursts of dialogue and acting with a capital A.

Nowhere is this more effective than in a scene between Collette's Beth and Kinnear's Tom. It starts with Tom's gentle questioning over how Gabe and Karen learned about their breakup -- he had wanted them to break the news together -- and ends with a physical fight that degenerates into rough sex.

"The thing is, you never know what couples are like when they're alone," Quaid's Gabe remarks to his wife later. "You just never do."

Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, also by Margulies, Dinner With Friends pays close attention to language, retaining many of the stage play's original lines.

That's the result of intensive rehearsal and attention to detail, said Jewison.

"I haven't paid as much attention to dialogue in any film I've made more than this one," said the director, who cut his teeth working on such classic '60s-era TV shows as The Judy Garland Show before moving to film. "I think it's because I felt an honesty in the writing. It was like I was hearing something that was very real for me."

Because this is a TV movie, Quaid's and Kinnear's characters talk in ways men -- even those who are close friends -- rarely do.

Tom reveals that Karen doesn't often show affection; she once unknowingly went a week without touching him, he says. But Tom's own self-centered world view -- he grows angry at Gabe's confusion and efforts to make sure he has thought everything through -- leaks out between the lines.

And so, regardless of how predictable the plot, Dinner With Friends is likely to touch many nerves among viewers of a certain age and station. It's the kind of intimate drama that increasingly seems suited to television -- especially the rarified, premium cable atmosphere of HBO.

"I was allowed to work with material . . . I don't think any movie studio would even look at today," said Jewison. "They don't make films very often that deal with the reality in our lives and people talking to each other, you know. It's too sensitive and too intimate and maybe too sophisticated. (That makes) television the greatest medium ever devised by man."

AT A GLANCE: Dinner With Friends airs at 9 p.m. Saturday on HBO. Grade: A-. Rating: TV-MA.

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