Two men sit down and have a conversation over dinner. Is that the synopsis for My Dinner with Andre? That would be it on a super-simplistic level. Yes, they have a conversation, and (more or less) they have dinner. But what do they talk about? Why are they meeting? We learn from the narration from Wallace Shawn that he's been avoiding his friend Andre Gregory for quite some time, and that Andre's been away in foreign countries for years. The impression is that, at first, this will be an awkward dinner. As it turns out, it's anything but. As Douglas Adams would say, My Dinner with Andre is about Life, the Universe, and Everything (at least it would seem).<br /><br />Oh, it's a bit odd to just have two talking heads as an entire movie. Louis Malle doesn't even go into the kind of visual technique that Richard Linklater would use on Before Sunrise and Sunset to at least keep the camera moving. And yet I found myself, somehow, even more engaged by the dialog between Shawn and Gregory than I did in Linklater's films (which is a close call as those are fantastic anyway). What makes it so captivating is that you feel like you're right there with Shawn and Gregory - at first we're more like Shawn, just listening and somewhat curious about what has been going on with this other guy. And Gregory tells stories, elaborate ones it might seem and epic in its scope around the world (Tibet, Poland, Scotland, Long Island) about his theatrical rituals and participation in New-Age type ceremonies, improvisations, what-have-you. The interesting thing is this: I started to see in my mind what Gregory talked about.<br /><br />In that sense, My Dinner with Andre leaves the audience imagining as they would reading this in a novel. But then something else even more important happens, which is that Gregory, and then by proxy Shawn, go into depths that are unexpected. The entry point for this is Andre: he finally had enough of all of his soul-searching artist work (the final straw was being buried alive for half an hour, a scene that Malle finally does a perfect zoom-in close-up for), and how he feels like his career as an artist might be dead. Why? Because the world of theater is decaying, he says. What is there when people, intellectual theater types, wouldn't go near certain plays years ago that now they go to and say "oh, that was pretty good?" This leads into the philosophical meat of the movie, which is: what does it mean to really "be" in a society that numbs people, makes them feel mechanical in nature? What do to you about being alive or feel in love with someone, or actually do something with yourself? <br /><br />Gregory's tactics to get at this might seem far-off at first - his descriptions of his time in Tibet and Poland, for example, seems silly, but it does lead somewhere for the audience, and it opens up Shawn into the dialog. The tables turn, so to speak, on who's talking and who is listening, as Wally, who can't seem to wrap his head around these rituals (a segway: "There was a play I saw, did you see it, where people got strangled on a submarine?"), and then it becomes about both men, as men, having to come to grips with where they stand in their lives. On the one hand Gregory knows that even if there isn't much hope in the transcendental stuff and meditating and so on, one has to try to at least see if one can live; on the other hand Shawn, as a near (or would be) bourgeois, is content to just stay at home and read his Charleton Heston autobiography and sometimes go out with his wife and so on. The reality of living, as artists and as existentialists would put it, is what's really on the table here, and it's utterly fascinating to watch this, as stories and as inquiry.<br /><br />Sure, some people won't get into it. Some probably would do best to not go anywhere near it (and you probably know if you are if you groaned at "two hours of talk by some guy I never heard of and that 'inconceivable!' guy from Princess Bride?"). But for those who want something a little different, something that is not at all conventional, this is the movie, possibly, of a lifetime. It's certainly rich enough to warrant repeat viewing, and at the least, on director Malle's end, he never makes it feel static, giving us angles and shots that do keep the conversation moving and adding dynamic interest (if nothing else the cutaways to the waiter played by Jean Lenauer, are hilarious). It's a masterpiece of gab and thought, and about how men in an upper middle class setting think and feel and need to connect (or don't need) to something.