LATE FOR DINNER
A film review by Jeff Davis
Copyright 1992 Jeff Davis
[Short precis of LATE FOR DINNER. Two young men from 1962 on the run from the law happen upon an experimental cryogenics lab. They are unwittingly frozen until an accident in 1991 awakens them. More plot explanation would tread close to spoilers.]
There are so few, genuinely sweet-natured movies out there, that it's hard to know what to say when one comes along. For example, GREGORY'S GIRL by Bill Forsyth. It evaporates in front of your eyes: Gregory plays soccer, he develops a crush on the team's only girl player, he manages to finagle a date with her, but never quite gets there. End of movie. I've recommended lots of movies to people who come back with a "What did I just see?" reaction. I remember one co-worker who came back from LOCAL HERO absolutely livid. "Nothing happened!" he said. He wanted me to reimburse him for his ticket.
Add LATE FOR DINNER to the list. We rented it Friday night and loved it and showed it to friends after the Derby on Saturday night. They loved it too. When I turned it in to the video place on Saturday the normally ersatz-Soviet lumpenprole who clerk for the video place all wanted to know my reaction and we all felt like one of the Elect when we confirmed our feelings for the movie.
But there's a caveat. There's "nothing" much there. It is a Rip Van Winkle story with a couple of John Steinbeck heroes grafted on to it. (I'm thinking of OF MICE AND MEN but any of his honest, simple men will do.) But, it swings throughout. The director, W. D. Richter, doesn't go in for any of the usual longeurs that are the stock in trade of saccharine movies. The action snaps from one scene to the next. "Sweet" usually means "treacly" but LATE FOR DINNER doesn't let you catch your breath. He doesn't linger over the big emotional scenes, so the 3 hanky crowd may wind up feeling cheated. This is Sonny Rollins playing "God Bless the Child" rather than Edith Piaf singing "La Vie en Rose."
Which is not to say the movie doesn't have some flaws. For one thing, some of the dialogue between the two male leads has a tooth-ache RAISING ARIZONA preciosity to it. The movie begins in 1962 and I'd be willing to bet the screen-writer doesn't have more than a passing familiarity with the era: the diction sometimes seems more than arch. Abstract, is more like it. And some of the names are too *boldly symbolic* for words. They have a writing workshop odor to them. But that soon passes and the script's self-conscious structural strategies actually payoff and help sustain it: the movie constantly has an eavesdropper lurking somewhere to take note of the heroes' dislocations: a doctor, a waitress, a push cart vendor. By the end of the movie, the audience can easily perform that function and every modern tic and bad habit can woosh by without having to be underlined.
The leads are both fine: I've never seen anyone in the movie before except for Peter Gallagher from SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE. Gallagher must have the same agent as William Atherton and Charles Grodin: he seems to be doomed to playing slime-balls. The actor who plays Willie Husband looks like a computer merger of Richard Gere and Alec Baldwin, but he has a style and presence of his own. Expect more from him in the future. (Sorry, I'm not a credit hound. I don't remember his name.)
As I've said in other posts, I don't much care for ranking movies. I enjoyed it a lot and almost everyone that I've talked to who has seen it has liked/loved it as well.