Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.
Monsieur Pierre Brochant, a handsome successful publisher, has invited you to join an exclusive group of the finest and brightest men in Paris for dinner next Wednesday night. Brochant’s fashionable circle of friends include some of the most upwardly mobile men in Paris and you’ve been especially singled out for inclusion. What does it mean? How should you interpret this interest? Does it indicate that your special talents have finally been recognized? Does it reveal that these socialites respect your intelligence and wit? Not all together. What it means, more precisely, is that you’re an idiot!!
You see, Monsieur Brochant and his haute bourgeois friends sometimes get bored with their rounds of golf and power lunches. These are pretty much the same guys who years ago were the fraternity presidents at their respective alma maters. Back then they organized what were called “dog dinners.” Each guy had to invite to dinner the ugliest girl he could find and whoever brought the ugliest one of all was the winner. The poor young ladies, flattered by unaccustomed attention, were never filled in on the purpose of the occasion. Now these guys are mostly married and dog dinners are out of the question, so they’ve come up with an alternative sport – “idiot dinners.” Each regular invites the biggest idiot they can find – someone with an eccentric hobby, for example – so that the entire group can be regaled by tales of obsessive excess and wallow in idiot depreciation.
Historical Background:The Dinner Game (1998) was written and directed by Francis Veber based on his own 1992 play by the same name (Le Dîner de Cons in French). I suspect that Veber and I were born with identical funny bones because everything that he has touched in cinema ranks among my comedic favorites. He scripted the hilarious The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1972) and the magnificent La Cage aux Folles (1978). Later he wrote and directed the two gems featuring Pierre Richard and Gérard Depardieu, La Chèvre (1981) and Les Compères (1983). All of these films are classic French farces, combining slapstick style physical humor, with witty dialogue, and utterly absurd situations. Veber is a master of pace, moving his pieces along from one gag to another in rapid succession. One reviewer of The Dinner Game commented that even the press at the screening of this film was laughing throughout and broke out in applause at its conclusion. Many of Veber’s movies have been remade by Hollywood but none of the remakes have matched the originals. The Tall Blond was remade as The Man with One Red Shoe with Tom Hanks, La Cage aux Folles became The Birdcage with Robin Williams, Les Compères became Fathers’ Day with Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, and Le Chèvre became Pure Luck with Martin Short. Even Veber has been unable to make his formula work in English. His two American films, Three Fugitives and Out on a Limb were both duds. No doubt Hollywood will get around to massacring the script of The Dinner Game sooner or later as well.
The Story: The story begins with an example of an “idiot.” The man in question collects boomerangs and stops by the park each day on his way to work to play with them. He hurls one of his toys, hears his cell phone rings, answers it, and – of course – the boomerang returns and conks him on the head. The phone call, by the way, was an invitation to the idiot dinner from a competitor of Pierre Brochant. Pierre (Thierry Lhermitte) will have to outdo himself to top the boomerang idiot but he has his scouts out scouring the Parisian landscape for candidates. One of Pierre’s friends meets a world class idiot on the train, a man, François Pignon (Jacques Villeret), who painstakingly builds models of architectural wonders out of matchsticks. He’s got one, for example, of the Eiffel Tower and another of a giant crane that he calls “Beau Derrick.” Brochant is enraptured and calls François immediately to invite him to the dinner and for a pre-dinner cocktail at his home. The taped message on François’s machine is pretty much indicative of his nature:
François is out, but don’t pout!
No need to weep, wait for the beep!
Your turn to peep.
Pierre is a publisher, so the pretext for the invitation is easy. He claims that his publishing company wants to explore the idea of published a book of photographs of François’s models.
Pierre and François couldn’t be more different. Pierre is charming, intelligent, well-heeled, and suave, but, he’s got a cynical mean streak. François is a pudgy, squat, sweaty, tax clerk – a silly but good-hearted oaf. François boasts about the 346,423 matchsticks that went into one of his creations and the thirty-seven tubes of glue that were expended. Pierre is delighted. He’s got the world champion of idiots and is sure to win. His only problem is that he has badly wrenched his back playing golf and can hardly move about. It breaks his heart, but it looks like he’ll have to postpone taking François to dinner for a week. François is about to leave when Pierre gets a message on his answering machine. His beautiful wife, Christine (Alexandra Van Der Noot), has decided to leave him because of his nasty mean streak. The good-hearted François cannot possibly leave the poor fellow in this unfortunate condition – bad back and dumped by his wife. He’ll stay and help Pierre work things out. Just one problem, though: when an idiot tries to help fix your life he’s bound to turn it into a complete shambles! Pretty soon Pignon’s well-intentioned efforts have resulted in alerting Pierre’s mistress, Marlene Hissister (Catherine Frot), to his wife leaving and now she’s ready to move in. The wife, who Pignon meets in the hallway and mistakes for the mistress, is inadvertently informed about the mistress. The wife’s ex-husband, Just Leblanc (Francis Huster), from whom Pierre had stolen his wife, has likewise been made privy to Pierre's distress and given ample opportunity to gloat at Pierre’s now ridiculous situation.
It seems, however, that Christine has not gone back to her ex-husband but may instead be staying with a sleazy seducer named Ménard, who keeps a love nest. Fortunately (or unfortunately), Pignon has a friend, Cheval (Daniel Prévost), a tax-auditor, who knows the address of the infamous love nest. Cheval agrees to bring the address to Pierre’s apartment as long as he can watch the second half of the Paris-Marseilles soccer game there. A tax-auditor is, however, the last person you want in your apartment if you have a lot of undeclared, high-value items. The expensive paintings and knickknacks are quickly shoved into a storage closet, but, of course, Pierre leads Cheval into the storage closet instead of the bathroom after the auditor drinks the expensive wine laced with vinegar to make it seem like cheap wine. You get the idea.
Veber toys with the audience at the very end of this farce, seeming to be on the verge of breaking one of the cardinal rules of farce – never permit the characters to overcome their foibles. Veber almost creates a maudlin moralistic ending in which Pierre is about to admit to being a bigger idiot than his unfortunate protégé, but the author backs off at the last moment. François truly is a world class idiot, but what does that make Pierre – who has allowed an idiot to meddle in his life and turn it into chaos? The Dinner Game simply proves that we are all idiots – each in our own way.
Themes: I guess the theme of this film is something like the relative idiocy of eccentricities versus insufferable snobbery. For me, that’s an easy choice since I’ve always been somewhat eccentric and have always preferred eccentric people throughout my life. In the hands of a lesser writer, The Dinner Game could have devolved into cruel stuff indeed, but Veber maintains an element of humanity by keeping his characters fundamentally likable.
Production Values:The Dinner Game cannot have cost much to film, since almost all of the action takes place inside one apartment. It is amazing, given how little change of venue occurs, that this is nevertheless a fast paced film that flies by. It is also a testament to Veber’s skill as a screenwriter that all of the characters in this film are both sympathetic and flawed. Even though the idiot dinner that Pierre and his friends enjoy is vile, we can’t help pitying the guy who can barely move around his apartment and is dumped by his wife because of his vile game. François may be hopelessly incompetent, but he’s as adorable as a koala bear.
My favorite scenes were those involving the ex-husband – Just Leblanc. Despite the fact that Pierre had stolen his wife, he had refrained from mocking poor Pierre or crowing at the turnabout in his fortunes with Christine leaving him or his becoming incapacitated with a bad back. But, seeing him in the hands of François, his “idiot”, having his entire life torn to shreds is more than Leblanc's sense of compassion can withstand. It is all too much poetic justice and Leblanc breaks down into one raucous and contagious guffaw after another. Leblanc is also at the center of one of the best wordplays of the film. François: “Doesn’t he have a first name?” Pierre: “No, it’s Just Leblanc!” You can imagine what kind of trouble Pignon had with Marlene’s surname, “Hissister.”
The most important performances are those delivered by Jacques Villeret, as François, and Thierry Lhermitte, as Pierre. The comedic timing between the two is superb. Villeret is the real showstopper. It is largely the interaction between these two that made The Dinner Game a big success in 1998, probably the funniest film of that year, and one of the top box office successes of all time in France. Francis Huster, who played Leblanc, is something of a Colin Firth look-alike.
Bottom-Line: Well, dear reader, we already established in the opening paragraph of this review that you’re an idiot. What about me? Well, quite honestly, I used to be something of an idiot but writing for Epinions has completely turned my life around and opened up all sorts of new opportunities for respect. Why, just the other day, I ran into an old friend from college who I hadn’t seen for years. We didn’t really run in the same circle too much – he was something of a big man on campus and I was more of a geek, but I helped him, one semester, get through Econ 101. Now, he’s a vice president of a publishing company and sells real estate in his spare time. He’s made a bundle! Of course, he wanted to know all about what I’ve been up to. I told him that in the last six months I’ve been watching hundreds of obscure foreign films that hardly anyone else watches and writing reviews of the films for an internet outfit called Epinions. He was very intrigued, especially when I mentioned that I had already earned about $30 in income share. He wanted to know how many reviews I had written and how long each one had taken. When I told him that I had written almost two-hundred and that each one takes maybe 4-6 hours (sometimes longer if the topic is a complex one), he was even more fascinated. He said, “So, let’s see. Two hundred reviews for $30. That’s about 15 cents per review. And at, say, five hours per review, that’s about 3 cents per hour.” My friend was always pretty good at math! But then, what really amazed me is what he said next, “Say, I’ve got a group of friends that gets together every Wednesday night for dinner that would really like to hear about your reviews for Epinions.” Well, I can’t wait. You see? Now, thanks to Epinions, I’m moving up into the big time.
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