A cena con gli amici

Diner, Barry Levinson's writing and directing debut belongs to so-called "small" or "minor" movies and it indeed does not have spectacular locations, breathtaking action sequences or even dramatic story. As Kevin Bacon comments in the Behind the Scenes Documentary, "There's not that much of a story, really. What do we do? We drive around..." What the movie has is "a very honest portrayal of a group...of guys that people relate to on a very personal level." The different generations of viewers react to film with devotion and recognition, and Diner has become one of the beloved long time cult favorites. Based on its writer/director's memories of growing up in Baltimore, the film takes place during the week between Christmas and New Year in 1959, and tells of the friendship of five guys in their early twenties. During the course of the film, we will get to know the young men, their fears of growing up, facing responsibilities, and making decisions, their fascination and insecurities with the girls.

From his Oscar-nominated script, BL makes the study of young men who hesitate to grow up but rather hang out in their beloved Diner. Daniel Stern's 'Shrevie' is an owner of LP collection that he seems to value more than his young and pretty wife (Ellen Barkin in her film debut). Mickey Rourke, played his best role (at least, IMO) as Boogy, the cynical womanizer with the most charming smile. Steve Guttenberg's Eddie puts his fiancée through the enormously difficult football quiz and the passing score is the must for the marriage because he is scared to get married. Kevin Bacon plays Fenwick, a permanently drunk and lost kid, the character much darker than the rest of the guys. Timothy Daly is Bill who seems to be the most successful of the bunch, and know what he wants but can't make the girl he loves to love him. By making Diner, Levinson actually put his native city, sleepy and provincial 1959 Baltimore, on the cinema map, and that's just one of movie's pleasures. And there are plenty. Diner is filled with authentic and believable scenes, situations, and conversations that everyone can relate to. The Diner's menu has a lot to offer to the grateful viewers and fans of the insightful, ironic, entertaining, small but bright and shiny gem. Barry Levinson does not flatter six protagonists but he understands them and loves them because he sees in them the indelible part of his own life, his experiences, and his own childhood friends. As another great film about childhood friendship says, "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?"

Barry Levinson went on to create many good and very good films after Diner. These are just a few: The Natural, Good Morning, Vietnam; Bugsy; Avalon; Sleepers, An Everlasting Piece, Disclosure, Wag the Dog, and his Oscar winner "Rain Man" but Diner will always have a very special place for me. This is the film I keep coming back to again and again, and as the time passes it only gets better.

As far as capturing a bygone era, DINER is a superb piece of cinematic worldbuilding: the cars, clothes, music, and popular culture shown all scream of the 1950s without glamming up the period too much, as everything looks lived-in and ordinary. The acting is superb across the board with Mickey Rourke as the standout.

The story itself is nothing too special. It clearly wants to be like AMERICAN GRAFFITI, capturing a sense of lost innocence and Baby Boomer nostalgia, but I did not care for the characters at all. When it comes to characters in a story, they have to be at least one of two things: sympathetic or interesting. The folks peopling DINER are neither. Most of the stories don't add up to much either: I was most interested in Rourke's conflict with the mob and the dilemma of the young pregnant woman who wants to keep her job rather than become a housewife, but none of this goes anywhere.

Much has been made of the misogyny in the film, but I have to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt-- it's probably intentional since all these guys are self-absorbed, immature, and (with the exception of the Timothy Daly character) unable to see the women in their lives as anything other than add-ons to their own lives. None of this is portrayed as natural or good, though it is true that the women in the film don't receive much development... though again, neither do the male characters, hence my disinterest in the film as anything other than a technically competent exercise in nostalgia.

PS To be honest, the only scene where I laughed was during the hilarious butchering of "Blue Moon" at the wedding. That's it.

Recent films set in the 1950s, such as 'Pleasantville', 'Far from Heaven' and 'Mona Lisa Smile' have tended to portray the decade as being a repressed, overly conservative period. A generation ago, however, the tendency was to take a more sympathetic, nostalgic look at the fifties in films such as 'Grease' or television programmes such as 'Happy Days'. The post-Vietnam generation seemed to look back at the period immediately before that war as a lost age of innocence.

'Diner' follows a group of young men from Baltimore, former school friends now in their early twenties, over a week of their lives, that between Christmas Eve and New Year, 1959. Some of them are still living and working in the town, others are now at college, but are using the Christmas vacation as a chance to get back together with old friends. The title is taken from the diner that is their favourite meeting-place. There is no real coherent plot; the film is very episodic in structure and concentrates on character rather than on action.

As is perhaps inevitable with young men of this age, many of their preoccupations are with girls and relationships. One of them, Shrevie, is married, but seems to be discontented with married life. Another, Eddie, is engaged. A third, Billy, discovers during the course of the film that he has got his girlfriend pregnant, but when he offers to do the decent thing by her, he is disconcerted to realize that she would much rather he did the indecent one. A fourth, Boogie, seems to lead a carefree life, flitting from one romance to another. The characters are not, however, preoccupied with love and sex to the exclusion of all else. We also learn about their other private obsessions with such matters as music, sport and the cinema. Shrevie quarrels with his wife because she does not share his passion for popular music and fails to understand his complex system for cataloguing his extensive record collection. (I wonder if this scene was the origin of a similarly obsessive character in 'High Fidelity'). Eddie's passion for sport is even more all-consuming than Shrevie's for music; he subjects his fiancée Elyse to a football quiz and threatens to break off the engagement if she cannot score a sufficiently high score. A minor character knows off by heart the entire dialogue from the film 'Sweet Smell of Success'.

Many of the young actors who starred in the film have gone on to become famous names in the movie world. From my point of view the best was probably Kevin Bacon as Timothy, the rebel without a cause who has dropped out of his wealthy family and lives an aimless life. (The first time we see him he is smashing windows just for the hell of it). I was, however, also impressed by Daniel Stern as Shrevie and Mickey Rourke as Boogie.

I have never been to Baltimore, but it was clear from watching the film that the director was trying to capture the spirit of a particular place and time. It therefore came as no surprise to discover that Barry Levinson, who both wrote and directed the film, is himself a Baltimore native, although slightly younger than the characters depicted in the film. (He would have been seventeen in 1959). Despite this concentration on the particular, however, 'Diner' has a universal appeal. The film with which it has most in common is 'American Graffiti'. Although that film was actually set in the early sixties rather than the fifties, it nevertheless deals quite openly with the idea of the pre-Vietnam era as a golden age. 'Diner' does not deal with this theme so overtly, but there is still nevertheless a distinct sense of an era coming to an end. It is significantly set in the final week of a decade, and in the wedding scene we see a large banner saying 'Eddie and Elyse- in the sixties and forever', a reminder that change is on the way, both for these young men and for America as a whole.

The most important change that the characters in 'Diner' have to come to terms with is neither social nor political, but rather the challenge of growing up. The traditional 'Coming of Age' film has tended to concentrate on adolescence and the teenage years. For many young men, however, their early twenties, when they are completing or have already completed their education, are setting out on their careers and are starting to think about more serious relationships with women, can be a time of even greater changes than their days in secondary school. All the major characters- except perhaps the serious-minded Billy who is keen to accept new responsibilities- want to hang on to elements of their boyhood even while moving into adulthood.

For Boogie, and, to an even greater degree, Timothy, this means keeping the freedom to be irresponsible. For Shrevie and Eddie, this means trying to keep hold of their youthful passions even after marriage. The discord between Shrevie and his wife (slightly older than him and considerably more mature in outlook) is caused as much by his fear that marriage will mean having to give up his association with his old friends as by her inability to differentiate between jazz and rock-and-roll. Barry Levinson's claim that Elyse's football test was based on a true incident may seem improbable, but there is some psychological truth in this part of the film. It has, after all, been said that every man's ideal woman is himself incarnated in the body of a beautiful girl, and Elyse's willingness to take this test shows that she is prepared to make sacrifices and enter into Eddie's male-oriented world.

'Diner' is a film worth seeing more than once. On my first viewing I found it dull, an inferior copy of 'American Graffiti'. The second time round, I started to appreciate it as a fine film in its own right. Barry Levinson has gone on to make a number of other good films ('The Natural', 'Good Morning Vietnam', 'Rain Man' and 'Sleepers'), but 'Diner', his first film, is perhaps his most personal and heartfelt. 8/10

When Mickey Rourke has to tell you that you're behaving like a jerk and to knock it off, you know you have problems. That would be at the opening when Boogie (Rourke) tells Fenwick (Kevin Bacon) to stop knocking out the windows in the men's bathroom with his bare hands, with Fenwick not angry, but instead drunk and giggling the entire time.

These two are part of a group of young men in their early twenties who have known each other all of their lives and are at a crossroads where they'll likely part, not due to any fundamental disagreement or falling out, but just because that's what adults do because of career choices, marriage, and diverging interests. Deep down they know this and they are fighting it in various ways, but in the meantime they gather in the titular diner to eat greasy food and talk into the night about nothing.

Everybody knows why Barry Levinson sets everything he writes and directs, even his series Homicide about a bunch of homicide detectives, in Baltimore. He was born there. He loves the place. But he was 17 in 1959 when this film is set, not 23, so the time period is a bit of a puzzle. Maybe to put this in the time that he was 23 - 1965 - would require too much of the revolution in culture that was going on at the time, and that's not what he wanted the film to be about.

The central focus of the film is Eddie's (Steve Guttenberg's) upcoming wedding. Eddie wants this thing yet he fears it for any number of reasons - the loss of independence, the loss of his virginity which he has never managed to lose up to this time, the eventual loss of this core group of friends. Eddie's fiance, Elyse, is never shown. You see the back of her at the wedding, you hear her voice during "the test", but that's all. I guess that makes her an indescribable presence that is going to change everything. And about that "test" that determines if she and Eddie will marry - over football knowledge? What woman would agree to such nonsense? I would see it as an absolute sign that my husband to be is trying his best to find any reason - even a ridiculous one - to get out of the wedding. But I digress.

I'd recommend this one for all of the little scenes, the big picture, the roster of stars who were just starting out, and the nostalgia for the late 50s which is perfect with a great soundtrack.

It actually is not about food - it is about how men grow up .. or do they? There is a case to be made about boys never really (or rarely) grow up to be men. And with a cast that is quite astonishing ... with themes that at least still to this day seem ageless ... while technology and other things do advance, there is a universal truth about issues most of us face while growing up.

Tough to say if in decades from now this looks like something that people can not connect anymore. Or not to the degree we think they are able to ... Back to the cast and not just Steve Guttenberg surprising me or a young Kevin Bacon (with a hint to the Friday franchise and Ketchup?), but even more so with a young rebel by the name of Mickey Rourke. I almost did not recognize him. But there are also some very fine female performers in this, the movie overall does focus on the male outlook though. Then again issues with OCD or something similar are not gender related of course ... even if it again mostly is put on the male cast here.

A good movie for anyone who likes movies about ... something or nothing in particular other than life and choices and relationships ... with some amazing performances to say the least.