Open your mind with My Dinner with Andre (1981)

My Dinner with Andre is a movie I'd heard about because I'm quite a fan of The Totally Rad Show podcast. It's been brought up a number of times as one of the host's favorite movies of all time. I figured that was more than enough to give it a fair shake. After all, if something can be someone's favorite anything of all time, there has to be something to it. The trick to My Dinner with Andre, is it literally is just that. It's 2 gentlemen, having dinner, and conversing with each other for nearly 2 hours. Nothing else. So something like that even hold up as a movie? Find out after the jump.


As I said, the entirety of My Dinner with Andre is nothing but 2 men talking. They order dinner, they get their meals, and they talk. That's it. To some, this will be the MOST boring movie in the world. For a while even I was wondering what the hell I'd gotten myself into. I even considered turning it off and watching something else for today. But I decided to stick with it a bit longer, and then something happened. Not in the movie, nothing happens in the movie. Something happened to me. 

Suddenly while watching the movie I became engrossed. Everything they were saying became deep and buried in meaning. No, I wasn't smoking anything or drinking. It's more like suddenly I saw these 2 guys as real people, people I might be having a conversation with myself. Most of the time when you're with your friends, the things you talk about aren't really important or have any outside value other than to yourselves. But the things that Andre and Wally talk about take on an importance.

Wally & Andre have dinner and talk for the whole movie

Once Andre had laid the ground work with some background details about himself and the trips he'd been on, then they really start talking about what that all means. We're talking, what's it mean to really be human. What's the point of life. Really deep philosophical talk here. And what makes it even more interesting is that Wally doesn't always agree with Andre. He straight up says a few times that he just can't accept the theories Andre is coming up with. A few of which are REALLY far out there.

The other thing I'd like to bring up before I finish here would be how I ended up feeling during this movie. The topics they bring up and end up discussing, if you really start to think about them as I did, I found to end up being quite unsettling. You might start thinking, am I not really living my life? Am I just on autopilot like a machine going through the motions of what I think is my life? It's some pretty heady stuff and I think can only leave you utterly depressed, or awakened to new possibilities.

This certianly, under no circumstances would be a movie for everyone. In fact I think very few people would find any value in this. It's a long slow burn, but if you're willing to look, there's some profound things to find.