Cinema: Small Bore

MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ

Directed by Louis Malle

Screenplay by Wallace Shawn and #21 Gregory

In a Manhattan restaurant, a round, balding actor-playwright named Wallace Shawn sits down to dinner with a lean, overarticulate theatrical director named André Gregory. The friends have not seen one another for some years mostly because Gregory has spent that time searching the world for transcendental experiences. He has been to adult play groups in Poland, Scotland, Tibet, the Sahara—and Montauk Point. It is a measure of what is wrong with this movie (and maybe with the culture of the...