The Dinner (2017)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The dinner |
| Original title | The dinner |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2017 |
| length | 120 minutes |
| Age rating |
FSK 12 JMK 14 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Oren Moverman |
| script | Oren Moverman |
| production |
Julia Lebedev , Eddie Vaisman , Cotty Chubb , Lawrence Inglee |
| music | Elijah Brueggemann |
| camera | Bobby Bukowski |
| cut | Alex Hall |
| occupation | |
| |
The Dinner is an American movie from Oren Moverman from the year 2017 . The chamber play-like thriller is based on the novel Done by Herman Koch and depicts the dramatic course of a dinner of two parents (played by Steve Coogan , Laura Linney , Richard Gere and Rebecca Hall ) who try to cover up a crime committed by their children.
The film premiered on February 10, 2017 in the competition at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival. The film premiered in the US on April 29, 2017 at the Montclair Film Festival. In Germany, the film opened in cinemas on June 8, 2017.
action
The unemployed history teacher Paul is reluctant to be persuaded by his wife Claire to accompany them to dinner with his brother Stan and his sister-in-law Katelyn, Stan's young second wife. The relationship between the brothers is tense. The two couples meet in an exquisite restaurant. The course of the multi-course menu is repeatedly disrupted by the departure of one of the participants. Stan is a well-known congressman and is repeatedly quoted outside on the cell phone by his assistant because there are still no supporters for a bill to be passed the next day. At the same time he is running for governorship and is considered a favorite for the post. Suffering from her husband's absence, Katelyn also has to take care of Stan's biological son, Rick, and two adopted African-American children, Val and Beau, from Stan's first marriage to Barbara. Paul, who suffers from a familial mental illness, disturbs dinner with sarcasm and tips against his successful brother, who is always preferred by his mother. It later emerges that Stan's bill is devoted to the benefit of the mentally ill.
After dessert, the conversation turns to a sensitive family matter. Paul and Claire's son Michael and Stan’s son Rick have committed a horrific crime. Coming from a party drunk with Beau, they both set a sleeping homeless person on fire in an ATM room when they were about to withdraw money for a taxi. The woman died as a result of the severe burn injuries. Despite the anonymous publication of a cell phone video recording on an online platform and its broadcast in the television news, the crime has not yet been traced back to the two minors. A public disclosure would change families' lives forever. Parents get into an argument about what to do. While Claire and Katelyn work to keep the crime under the guise of secrecy, Stan plans to call a press conference the next morning to reveal his son's involvement. This would also mean the end of Stan's political career.
Events tumble when Paul finds out Claire knows about the crime. She has secretly instructed Michael to use money to silence Stan's adopted son Beau, who published the cell phone video. When Beau gets cold feet and refuses the money, Claire asks her husband to “talk” to Beau. Paul, who has meanwhile stopped his medication, drives to his brother's estate and tries to kill Beau with a stone. He is disturbed by the arriving Stan and Katelyn, who have in the meantime agreed on a further three days to think about it. Beau escapes while Paul is beaten up by his brother Stan, who feared worse. In the end, Stan finds out via cell phone that there will be enough supporters to vote for his bill, while Katelyn tries to reach Beau by phone and Claire calls her son Michael. Paul makes fun of the "monkeys" calling on the phone.
During the film, the crime committed by the sons is shown in flashbacks and the family situation is explained through scenes from Paul and Stan's past. Claire suffered from cancer, while Stan tried unsuccessfully to talk to his mentally ill brother on a visit to Gettysburg National Military Park .
History of origin
Literary template
The Dinner is based on the novel Angerierter (original title: Het diner ) published in 2009 by the Dutch author Herman Koch . In the novel, which is set shortly before the parliamentary elections, the disagreeable first-person narrator Paul Lohman, his wife Claire and his brother Serge and his wife Babette come together in a posh Amsterdam restaurant. Serge is a politician and the top candidate of the opposition, which according to the polls will win the elections. Paul, who has quit school as a teacher due to mental health problems, finds a video on his son Michel's cell phone. Then Michel, as well as Serge and Babette's son Rick, mistreat a homeless person and set her on fire. Recordings of the video are already circulating on the Internet, and the hitherto unknown perpetrators have already been publicly searched for on television.
With the exception of a short epilogue, the novel preserves the structural unity of place and time. Koch laid out the arranged dishes with its 45 chapters in five sections (“aperitif”, “starter”, “main course”, “dessert” and “digestif”). The structure is based on a classic tragedy according to Aristotle . Topics are unconditional parental love, but also hypocrisy, immorality and xenophobia of the middle class. As in his previous work as an author and actor, Koch linked "[...] the absolutely funny and absurd with the abysmal evil". The figure of Serge, which is based on the former Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende , illustrates the eroded cosmos of values of the Dutch middle class of the post- Fortuyn era, according to specialist criticism .
Served , Koch brought his breakthrough as a novelist. Although the characters' typicity and the often forced unity of space and time were criticized, the novel became a bestseller because of its simple language and simple structure. The award-winning work topped the Dutch bestseller list for seven months and was also on European and American best lists for weeks. When the German first edition was published in 2010, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung rated Koch's work as a “brilliant tragic comedy about the flexibility of morality”, while the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2013 called it a “key work” by the author.
Previous film adaptations
With Het Diner a first film in the Netherlands was established, 2013. Directed by Menno Meyjes took Jacob Derwig , Thekla Reuten , Daan Schuurmans and Kim van Kooten the leading roles. In 2014 the film received nominations at the Dutch Film Festival and for the Rembrandt Audience Award .
Another film adaptation of Koch's novel followed in Italy in 2014, Ivano De Matteo's I nostri ragazzi . The main roles were played by Luigi Lo Cascio , Giovanna Mezzogiorno , Alessandro Gassman and Barbora Bobulova . De Matteo's film won several awards at the 71st Venice International Film Festival and was nominated for the Nastro d'Argento film award in several categories in 2015 - Gassman (in Richard Gere's role) won the award for Best Actor.
production
The Israeli director Oren Moverman was originally only intended as a screenwriter for The Dinner . When the film project was announced in September 2013, Cate Blanchett was named as the director. The Australian actress had fewer film roles in front of the camera between 2008 and 2013 and instead took on the management of the Sydney Theater Company (STC) together with her husband Andrew Upton . For Blanchett, this also included directing plays based on Harold Pinter and Joan Didion . She would have made her debut as a film director with The Dinner .
In January 2016, it was announced that Oren Moverman would also direct instead of Cate Blanchett, who was prevented from doing other commitments. He then revised the script again. In addition to Steve Coogan , Laura Linney , Rebecca Hall and Chloë Sevigny , Moverman also signed Richard Gere . He signed the latter first. Moverman had entrusted Gere with the lead role in his previous feature film Time Out of Mind (2014), a drama about a homeless man in New York. Gere also starred in Moverman's co-produced political thriller Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (2016). Steve Coogan chose Moverman because the British actor could make the role of Paul both funny and very disturbing and agile, without any filters.
Moverman described Koch's novel as "[...] an extraordinarily provocative, tricky ride that takes up culturally relevant topics and turns them into a tricky menu of human passions and original fears". He was particularly interested in the question raised in Dished , how far someone would go to protect his child and the transfer of the story to the USA as a drama thriller. Moverman described The Dinner as a " Trumpian movie" after the premiere of the film . “It (the film) is about privileged people who are essentially locked into their world. […] People are locked in their own existence, their own little tribe and everyone outside of them is the other and should not be treated with any kind of compassion, ”said Moverman, who also brought up the figure of Paul who was up for discussion should help to destigmatize mental illness.
Filming began on January 21, 2016 and took the film team to Dobbs Ferry ( New York ) and the Gettysburg National Military Park near Gettysburg ( Pennsylvania ).
The companies Code Red , ChubbCo and Blackbird were responsible for the production, the former took over the complete financing of The Dinner .
synchronization
The German dubbing was based on a dialogue book by Alexander Löwe, directed by Nana Spier, on behalf of Splendid Synchron GmbH in Berlin.
| actor | role | German speaker |
|---|---|---|
| Steve Coogan | Paul Lohman | Marcus Off |
| Laura Linney | Claire Lohman | Katrin Fröhlich |
| Richard Gere | Stan Lohman | Hubertus Bengsch |
| Rebecca Hall | Katelyn Lohman | Marie Bierstedt |
| Chloë Sevigny | Barbara Lohman | Luise Helm |
| Charlie Plummer | Michael Lohman | Cedric Eich |
| Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick | Rick Lohman | Amadeus Strobl |
| Miles J. Harvey | Beau Lohman | David Kunze |
| Adepero Oduye | Nina | Katharina Spiering |
| Joel Bissonnette | Antonio | Patrice Luc Doumeyrou |
reception
After the world premiere of The Dinner on February 10, 2017 at the Berlin International Film Festival , initial reactions to the film varied.
German language criticism
One of the praising voices was Christiane Peitz ( Der Tagesspiegel ) , who saw the chosen family name Lohman as a reference to Arthur Miller's death of a traveling salesman and emphasized the relevance of Moverman's directorial work. In the depicted crime of the sons, she drew a parallel to a case that happened at the end of December 2016 at the Berlin Schönleinstraße subway station , in which young people set a sleeping homeless person on fire. Moverman distilled “a psychogram of Western society” from the novel and brought out “violence under the guise of civilization”. "In a virtuoso narrative mixed with flashbacks, jumpcuts and sound collages", the director studies the "strategies of cover-up, bigotry". Peitz drew the comparison to Roman Polański The God of Carnage (2011), but Moverman breaks up the unity of time and space and expands "the events into a psychoanalytic trip through the (sub-) consciousness of his protagonists" and hysterizes and pathologizes the language of the Photos. Steve Coogan in the role of Paul would add rhythm to the film. Although The Dinner is “in love with” its stylistic devices and “[…] aesthetically a bit chatty”, the “speed” always ensures “that Moverman's morality is not good for the self-satisfied moral sermon of a democratic juste milieu”. Susanne Ostwald ( Neue Zürcher Zeitung ) praised the refined and elliptical narrative style and the acting performance of the ensemble, also singling out Steve Coogan. The Dinner alternates between satire and tragedy, the changeable tenor makes the chamber play something special.
Michael Meyns ( the daily newspaper ) summarized the film as "rock solid, but not challenging cinema", but also emphasized its topicality in America of the Trump era. "Decline in values, cultural decay, but also a certain self-righteousness on the left" (embodied by actor Coogan) would swing as themes clearly on the surface. "The theater-like setting emphasizes the theatricality of a film that clearly shows its noble morals [...]", says Meyns. According to Dominik Kamalzadeh ( Der Standard ), the film wants to "convict the protagonists of their moral deficits", The Dinner is "the claim of the controversy written on the forehead". He criticized the narrative structure as being too "jittery and torn", the cinematic refined "trash optics" seemed undecided. "The mixture of sarcastic satire and social analysis gets stuck halfway," says Kamalzadeh. Frank Junghänel ( Berliner Zeitung ) said something similar about the film . The verbal exchange of blows works quite well at the beginning, but later you get tired of the characters. Moverman spells out the dilemma in which the characters are stuck “according to all the rules of conversational drama”. The flashbacks, in which he tries to make the characters' faults plausible, would not quite succeed.
English language review
Owen Gleiberman ( Variety ) drew comparisons to Mike Nichols ' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Polańskis The God of Slaughter . In contrast to the latter film, the novel from The Dinner is more captivating. The film has a "memorable atmosphere of concern," and Gleiberman praised the performance, especially that of Steve Coogan. Even if some of Coogan's acting may feel “artificial”, he appears “attractive” as Paul and delivers an “honest portrait of a damaged soul”. Director Moverman succeeds in balancing the theatrical potential with “fluid cinematic bravura”.
Lee Marshall (Screen International) also praised the performances of Steve Coogan, Laura Linney, Richard Gere and Rebecca Hall and felt the film was topical. He also used The God of Slaughter as a comparison, even if Marshall judged this to be "dramatically tighter" and provided with "more effective, satirical acting performances". He identified the character of the narrator and mood channel Paul Lohman as one of the big problems of the film, whose mental state would be somewhere between Asperger's syndrome and psychosis. The set in the past comedic roles Coogan propose to "honorable" with the offered serious part, despite the occasional " Allen -esquen swing" in his New York accent. The problem is the way his character destroys the "potentially good movie" by talking about everyone. Overman's decision to tell a lot from the inside of Paul makes The Dinner more of a film about mental illness and American history than about today's hypocrisy of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant . Marshall found the flashback with Coogan and Gere in Gettysburg to be "excessive".
Awards
The Dinner competed for the Golden Bear , the main prize of the film festival, in the competition at the Berlinale , but did not receive a prize.
literature
- Koch, Herman : Done . Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2013. - ISBN 978-3-462-04582-6 .
Web links
- The Dinner in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Profile at berlinale.de
Individual evidence
- ^ Certificate of Release for The Dinner . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF).
- ↑ Age rating for The Dinner . Youth Media Commission .
- ^ "The Dinner - Film 2017 - FILMSTARTS.de". Accessed June 24, 2017. http://www.filmstarts.de/kritiken/224162.html .
- ↑ a b c d Scheper, Moritz: Het Diner . In: Kindlers Literatur Lexikon Online (accessed February 5, 2017).
- ↑ a b c Herman Koch . In: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 05/2014 of January 28, 2014, supplemented by news from MA-Journal up to week 30/2015 (accessed via Munzinger Online ).
- Jump up ↑ Junge, Oliver: Hangman's meal for a teacher . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , August 27, 2010, No. 198, p. 32.
- ↑ Gertz, Holger: Deep Sea Diver . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 11, 2013, p. 3.
- ↑ "Het Diner (2013) - IMDb". Accessed February 5, 2017. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2352230/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_4 .
- ↑ "Het Diner - Awards - IMDb". Accessed February 5, 2017. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2352230/awards?ref_=tt_awd .
- ↑ "I nostri ragazzi (2014) - IMDb". Accessed February 5, 2017. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3561348/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_2 .
- ↑ "I nostri ragazzi - Awards - IMDb". Accessed February 5, 2017. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3561348/awards?ref_=tt_awd .
- ^ "Cate Blanchett to Make Directorial Debut With 'The Dinner' | Hollywood Reporter ". Accessed February 5, 2017. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cate-blanchett-make-directorial-debut-632456 .
- ^ Cate Blanchett . In: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 16/2016 from April 19, 2016, supplemented by news from MA-Journal up to week 21/2016 (accessed via Munzinger Online ).
- ↑ a b c “Richard Gere, Steve Coogan, Laura Linney Join Drama 'Dinner' | Hollywood Reporter ". Accessed February 5, 2017. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/richard-gere-steve-coogan-laura-856677 .
- ↑ a b c d "Berlin: Oren Moverman Talks 'The Dinner' and Making Films in the Trump Era (Q&A) | Hollywood Reporter ". Accessed February 11, 2017. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/berlin-oren-moverman-talks-dinner-making-films-trump-era-qa-973825 .
- ↑ "On the Set for 1/22/16: Michael Fassbender Starts Shooting Universal's 'The Snowman', Antonio Banderas Wraps on 'Security' | SSN Insider ”. Accessed February 5, 2017. Archived copy ( memento of the original from February 5, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ^ "Westchester's Richard Gere Filming 'The Dinner' Along Hudson River". Tarrytown-SleepyHollow Daily Voice. Accessed February 5, 2017. http://tarrytown.dailyvoice.com/lifestyle/westchesters-richard-gere-filming-the-dinner-along-hudson-river/620665/ .
- ^ Chynoweth, Nicole: Richard Gere films on Gettysburg Battlefield . In: The Evening Sun (Hanover, Pennsylvania), January 26, 2016, p. A3 (accessed via the Nexis press database ).
- ↑ Peitz, Christiane: Gods of Carnage . In: Der Tagesspiegel , No. 23025, February 11, 2017, p. 21.
- ^ Ostwald, Susanne: King Richard . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , February 11, 2017, p. 46.
- ↑ Meyns, Michael: On the surface . In: the daily newspaper , February 11, 2017, p. 16.
- ↑ Kamalzadeh, Dominik: A confession for dessert . In: Der Standard , February 11, 2017, p. 34.
- ↑ Junghänel, Frank: The slaughter is never over . In: Berliner Zeitung , February 11, 2017, No. 36, p. 23.
- ↑ “'The Dinner' Review: Berlinale 2017 | Variety ”. Accessed February 11, 2017. http://variety.com/2017/film/markets-festivals/the-dinner-review-berlinale-2017-1201982940/ .
- ↑ Marshall, Lee. "'The Dinner': Berlin Review". Accessed February 11, 2017. http://www.screendaily.com/reviews/the-dinner-berlin-review/5114847.article .
