Ben Harris-Roxas

A long review, based on my attempts to understand why I keep being drawn back to this small but profound film.

There is a moment about forty minutes into My Dinner with Andre when Wallace Shawn's face does something amazing. Andre Gregory is mid-monologue, he’s been mid-monologue for what feels like weeks, describing a ritual burial in New England, being placed in a coffin on All Soul's Eve while people sang over him. Wally is listening with an expression that sits precisely between being enraptured and panicked. The camera holds on to him. And in that moment, something the film has been building quietly becomes visible: we see a man in the process of being changed by language. Not persuaded. Not converted. Changed by the extended encounter with another person's inner life.

This is what My Dinner with Andre is about, and it’s why I find myself drawn to it again and again. It is a subject of almost unbearable relevance in 2026 but almost unimaginably distant from how we live now, 45 years after it was made.

The film itself has no interest in being relevant to anything.

The premise is genuinely unpromising. Two middle-aged New York theatre people - Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, playing versions of themselves, or playing themselves playing versions of themselves - have dinner at a fancy restaurant. Andre talks, mostly. Wally listens, mostly. They eat roasted quail. They drink wine. That's it. Louis Malle was asked why he directed it this way, and the honest answer is embedded in the film itself - this is the only way it could be done. Any attempt to open it up, to cut away, to vary the pace, to give the viewer something to look at other than these two faces, would have destroyed the thing it was trying to capture.

What it is trying to capture is interiority iself. Not ideas, though there are plenty of those. Andre’s monologues range across experimental theatre workshops in a Polish forest, eating sand in the Sahara with a Japanese Buddhist monk, a commune in Scotland where a mathematician claimed to see fauns, a burial ritual in which he lay in a coffin and was wept over by strangers. These are the stories of a man in profound spiritual crisis who also has money and connections and therefore gets to enact his crises in unusually exotic ways. It would be easy to be dismissive. Wally, to his credit, almost is. His early voiceover positions Andre as someone who has "gone mad”. A cautionary tale of the theatre-world mystic, the species that has mistaken its own existential vertigo for enlightenment.

But Gregory's performance is more complex than that. What he brings to these stories is not self-satisfaction but a quality of anguished searching, a sense that he is telling these stories in order to understand them himself, that the telling is the understanding, and that Wally is not merely an audience but a necessary component for sense-making. He raises an index finger before many of his statements, a tiny, compulsive gesture that comes across as someone trying to hold onto a thought that keeps threatening to dissolve. His face in close-up is remarkable. Classically aquiline with intense eyes that seem lit by something uncomfortable within.

Shawn's counter-performance is the film's secret weapon. He is, physically, everything Gregory is not. Round where Gregory is angular, still where Gregory is kinetic, deliberately earthly where Gregory is aiming for the ineffable.

Wally has a plan for surviving the dinner. Treat it like detective work, ask questions, stay curious, don't get sucked in. For a long time this works. The early “uh huhs" and "then what happeneds" are not passive - they’re Wally maintaining a careful distance from something he suspects might be dangerous to his sense of inner quilibrium.

The equilibrium breaks, famously, over an electric blanket. Andre has been arguing that modern comfort insulates us from reality, that our heated apartments and familiar routines function as a kind of anaesthetic against authentic experience. Wally, who has been cold and poor without artifice or performance, disagrees with a directness that surprises. He would never give up his electric blanket, because New York is cold, life is hard, and the small consolations are not luxuries but necessities. This is not a trivial rejoinder. It is a genuine philosophical position, and it arrives with the force of someone who has not thought it so much as lived it.

From this point the film becomes something different. What had been a performance becomes a conversation. Richard Gilmore, reading the film through Epicurean philosophy in his essay The Strange Attractions of the Epicurean Swerve in My Dinner with Andre, describes this as a "phase transition”, the moment when a system crosses into a new state. His framing is a bit earnest but the underlying observation is correct - something shifts, and the shift is irreversible. Wally begins to contribute stories of his own: New York parties that felt grotesque, friends who couldn't acknowledge genuine emotion, the particular loneliness of being surrounded by people performing sociability. Andre, who has spent the whole film up until then talking, begins to listen.

What the film understands that this kind of transformation can only happen through duration. You cannot rush. Andre’s meandering, seemingly self-indulgent odyssey through the first hour of the dinner is not preamble, it’s the mechanism. The listener has to be worn down. The defences have to soften not through argument but through sheer accumulation. Wally's conversion is less like a decision than a weather event. It happens to him rather than being chosen by him.

The film ends with Wally in a taxi, watching Manhattan slide past in the dark. His voiceover in this final sequence is different in quality from the defensive, anxious narration of the opening. It’s looser, more associative, each building connected to a memory, each memory opening onto another.

What Andre gave Wally was not a new set of opinions. It was access to his own interiority, unlocked by prolonged exposure to someone else's. This is what deep listening actually does, when it happens, which is rare. It doesn't change what you think. It changes how much of yourself you can see.

It is difficult to watch this and not feel the weight of what the current moment has arranged against it. Not in any nostalgic or technophobic spirit (he film is certainly not an ad for New York of the 1980s). But the specific conditions the film requires - sustained attention, tolerance of asymmetry, willingness to sit in discomfort while something slowly organises itself, the patience to let another person talk for a very long time before getting to the point - are conditions that the contemporary world actively trains out of us.

The short video, the take, the scroll. These represent a systematic re-education of our attention, away from the capacity depicted in this film.

Andre Gregory's stories are not TED-talks. They do not resolve neatly, if at all. They circle, they go too far, they weave between self-indulgence and madness. The one about eating sand in the Sahara is genuinely hard to process. The point is not the sand-eating. The point is what it costs to keep listening to him makes possible. The film asks the viewer to stay with something difficult and unresolved for two hours. It is less entertainment than a form of practice.

Malle, I think, understands all of this and his direction is an act of faith in the material (Shawn’s plays and his collection of essays are masterful and open a world of their own, but that’s a digression for another time). He follows classic shot/reverse-shot convention but with a few subtle distortions. Andre’s face doubled in a mirror behind the table to create a sense of a divided self watching itself speak. The waiter, grave and foreign-accented, moves through the frame like a figure from another register of experience, periodically reminding Wally and Andre that the world outside their conversation continues to exist. The confined restaurant setting becomes instead a kind of laboratory, all controlled except the two people and the time.

It is a film that does not move at all, and yet something happens in it. That is either nothing at all or a definition of what conversation, at its best, can actually be.

This post first appeared on Letterboxd.

Anthony Lapaglia and Josh Helman in Death of a Salesman

I saw the Sydney production of Death of a Salesman with Anthony Lapaglia in it. It was an interesting production. It suffered from being too faithful to the play as originally imagined, with uncreative staging. The costumes were faithful to the ’30s and ’40s, and the set was surprisingly static, with limited use of projection or dynamic elements.

The performances were great throughout, though. Alison Whyte fully inhabits the character of Linda, Josh Helman does a great job as Biff, and Anthony Phelan (one of the best vocal talents in Australian acting) brings a ghostly gravitas to the role of Willy’s brother Ben.

The play’s themes about escaping grinding precarity, forging a better life, and avoiding parental disappointment seem more relevant now than at any time since Miller wrote it. But the costuming and staging make it unlikely that the audience would recognise any of that in the play.

This is a pity. By failing to update the production design, the markers of racism and precarity are entirely invisible to a 21st-century audience. In 1949, the playwright David Mamet described Death of a Salesman as:

“the greatest American play, arguably, is the story of a Jew told by a Jew and cast in “universal” terms. Willy Loman is a Jew in a Jewish industry. But he is never identified as such. His story is never avowed as a Jewish story, and so a great contribution to Jewish American history is lost. It’s lost to culture as a whole, and, more importantly, it’s lost to the Jews, its rightful owners.”

Though this may have flown over the heads of most of the clueless 1940s U.S. audiences, some might have recognised themselves in Willy and Biff Loman. None would in this production.

Racism, classism, and precarity are still experienced by workers everywhere. By the security guards we pass every day. By the workers who take care of our old people and children. By the warehouse pickers and delivery drivers who bring us our purchases. By most of us.

Death of a Salesman still has important points to make about the meaninglessness of superficial charm and chasing material gain at all costs. By staging it as a historical piece, this production obscures its most powerful messages.

This post first appeared on Ben Harris-Roxas' blog at benhr.xyz

Kevin Kline playing Willy Loman in Soapdish (1991)

Stephen Markley has crafted a well-written, thousand-page sprawling multi-person narrative about the havoc we’ll face over next two decades due to climate change.

We follow a range of characters including a larger-than-life climate activist, a small group devoted to resisting extractivism through violence, a curmudgeonly climate scientist, a poor Midwesterner with a history of addiction, a modeller with autism, a PR shill for carbon polluters, and perhaps a dozen more characters. As the book unfolds we witness increasing climate chaos and political mayhem, fascism, collective action, gradual inadequate political change.

I liked this book – and I think it’s important – but it’s difficult, weighty reading. The vision of what the next two decades will hold seems accurate, chilling, and is frankly emotionally battering. Markley clearly understands climate science and has devoted considerable effort to imagining the unravelling of politics as climate disasters occur more frequently and vested interests dig in.

A major weakness of the book is that it focuses entirely on the perspective of Americans. While many of the horrifying impacts of the climate catastrophe described in the book affect the Global South most, we never follow the perspective of those who live beyond the U.S.’ borders. This is perhaps understandable. Markley is writing from perspectives that he knows and understands, primarily for an American audience. Unfortunately in doing so he perpetuates the kind of American egocentrism and exceptionalist thinking that has driven much of the climate catastrophe that we face.

In writing this review I’ve realised that the book could perhaps be 200-300 pages shorter. Many characters’ perspectives are not critical to the overall plot, and entire strands remain unresolved. Some of this meandering writing asists world-building, and the lack of resolution enhances the overall realism (do any of our lives have neat endings?).

There is a significant through-line about whether the urgency of the climate emergency requires violent direct action, or if social movements are the only way the necessary change can be achieved. Markley clearly thinks the latter, and I suspect he’s right. He explores the moral and interpersonal costs of this kind of political violence, which are some of the more interesting aspects of the book.

The Deluge is a powerful work of foresight-infused fiction, and if you’re not convinced of the urgency of climate action by the end you haven’t been reading properly. A stark future lies ahead, and sooner than we think. For these reasons I recommend it to others, but I’m reluctant to return to it myself.

Also posted on Bookwyrm