The Dinner

This film doesn’t end. It just stops. As if in mid-sentence. It’s like the abrupt end to The Sopranos, rejecting the reactionary and inane wrap-up to Breaking Bad. 

The open end is necessary because the moral, social and psychological issues the film sets in motion are too complex and too shifting to settle into any easy resolution. The closest we get to a conclusion is the closing song: “Don’t let the fuckers get you down.” Even that is ambiguous.

Richard Gere gets top billing as Stan Lohman, the congressman about to be elected governor. But his psychologically damaged younger brother Paul (Steve Coogan) has arguably the more central role and conveys the key line: “We make war for love.” 

As a high school history teacher Paul teaches Gettysburg, the beginning of the end — (i) of the civil war, and (ii) of a society securely rooted in values and moral certainty. Of course the Civil War was fought for economics as much as anything else. But the soldiers thought they were fighting for conflicting loves: the mythologized glory of the Old South vs the valiant ideal of egalitarian freedom.

Paul is a savage, it turns out, as we see in his two classrooms rants where his rage and cynicism overrun any academic decorum. As he early tells us, he prefers the heroic days of ancient Greece and Rome, the pagan energies, over the Dark Ages and ensuing silly niceties of modern times. 

That’s why the two brothers and their families take this slugfest to the ultra-expensive chichi restaurant. The setting makes this another exploration of Civilization and its Discontents. As the two couples debate how to treat their sons’ savagery the maitre d’ recites the pedigree of each ingredient. This is an extensio ad absurdum of the refinements of civilization and the rewards of its privileged. 

Paul is uncomfortable there, in part because he can't afford it, he doesn’t understand it, and he feels as  excluded from this ritual as he felt from his mother’s preference for Stan. If he seems sensible in disdaining the manners and the preciousness, he’s ultimately just destructive and rude. 

Stan is easy in that precious milieu, gliding through the crowd of Washington Insiders. His slickness tempts us to dismiss him. But when he decides to abandon his career and bring his son to justice Stan represents civilization at its moral best. 

The brothers’ different responses to the dinner cohere with their different responses to their sons’ brutal and mindless murder of a homeless black woman, burning her alive in an ATM booth. To our surprise, the slick politico wants his son to face judgment. The total strategist suddenly places morality and principle above expediency. In contrast, his more cynical — and less capable of action — brother decides to preserve the sons’ secret by setting out to kill Stan’s adopted black son, Beau, who has decided to turn in the two boys. 

Both mothers fiercely try to protect the boys against Stan’s eruption of morality. Claire (Laura Linley) tries to settle the matter without involving hubby Paul, arranging to pay off Beau for his silence. When he changes his mind, she orders Paul to “look after Beau” — a demand about as motherly as Lady Macbeth. 

Stan’s wife Katelyn shares Claire’s commitment to save the boys, even though they’re only her step-sons. Hungry to save their sons the mothers demonize and wholly misrepresent their innocent victim. Despite this difference, both woman are the supportive roots of their husband’s lives. The fierceness of maternal love bonds the women in contrast to their husbands’ antagonism. 

  Here the film seems most reflective of Trump’s America. In the mothers insistence upon protecting their own family interests above all law and morality, they are Republicans at their most acceptable. Paul slips into their position, off his meds, too weak and confused to resist. But the moral hero is the politician Stan, who places conscience and justice ahead of his own and his family’s interests. That’s the liberal politician, an endangered species in Trump’s America. 

Hence Stan’s campaign for a bill to grant the mentally afflicted the same health coverage as the physically ill get. This echo of Obamacare — and slap at Trumpcare — also reflects on how Stan grew out of his own mother’s madness, which persists in Paul. The figure we initially  reject — the slick Stan, Washington Insider — turns out to hold the moral center. This film posits a liberal humanity against the Trump ethos.

But it’s not an easy choice. Which is the villain: the mother who will do anything to protect her son or the father who places justice and morality over this personal interests? The film ends before the three-day delay Stan grants his wife to try to change his mind. We don't know how that family’s drama will end. Nor should we, given the complexities of the drama at the family, national and archetypal levels. 

But if we’re responsible citizens we’ll try to figure out what we would do in that position. It’s not easy. 

Beau being black replays the Civil War issues in the present moment. The black and white societies remain locked in mutual suspicion and guilt. Paul read even the younger Beau as manipulative and subversive, playing “the race card” to his own advantage. At the tragic ATM scene Beau has the conscience to walk away — but the cunning and self-service whether to blackmail the others or to turn them in. The black boy is given no sentimental support here, played as a fat, awkward outsider ultimately serving only himself. The name Beau is ironic because it evokes the white gentlemen of Tara not their slaves. 
     The older Lohman brothers also carry resonant names. Like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, Stan and Paul are tragic heroes driven to destroy themselves for their contradictory senses of what will best serve their sons, their selves. In matching reversals, the successful doer (Stan) here prioritizes principle over politics and the more theory-bound brother, history teacher Paul, only becomes a man of action when he’s poised to kill Beau.