Dîner entre amis

I happen to be someone who does like to watch the credits roll in when a movie ends. I know it's one of those silliest things a person can do after watching a movie but then when I saw the final credit, it's a made-for-TV movie from HBO. I was pretty impressed.

Gabe and Karen (Dennis Quaid and Andie MacDowell respectively) are food critics. They had been happily married for 12 years and have two sons as well. When one day their friend Beth (Toni Collette) was being invited over for dinner with her two sons in tow, Beth broke the news that she and her husband Tom are being separated because he was having an affair outside of the family. Given Tom is Gabe's friend and Beth is Karen's friend, married couple Gabe and Karen started to defend over what each of their best friend had did.

The way Tom questioned his wife over whatever happened at Gabe and Karen's house when she was there with the kids was a little, kind of scary. But maybe given he is a lawyer, it's just like that.

The movie even had scenes of flashback, showing the happier times between the four friends themselves. It was definitely really sweet to see those scenes.

Sometimes, the lines are not always being drawn clearly when it come to the marriage of someone you know or maybe your own's when something starts to happen. The grey area is there. Now maybe I am not of marriageable age yet, but then standing up to whatever your friend had did is one thing I am clearly aware about.

My final say? Like what I had mentioned on the title for this review.

Gabe (Dennis Quaid) and Karen (Andie MacDowell) are a married couple with kids. They are regaling their friend Beth (Toni Collette) with food stories from their trip to Italy. Beth shocks them by revealing that Tom (Greg Kinnear) had cheated on her and wants a divorce. It forces Gabe and Karen to reconsider their longtime friends.

Norman Jewison has adapted a play. This starts great with interesting actors. I hope for better but that's not in the cards. It's a relationship movie where I'm not sure that I care about the relationships. It is still fascinating at first but over time, I lost interest. It feels too much like a play.

TV may be mostly a wasteland these days, but every once in a while, a fine original film shows up on the tube. `Dinner With Friends' is certainly in that category. It takes the viewer deeply into the relationship between two couples and within each. They were best friends until one of the marriages hits the rocks. We see each side of that split and how it affects the other couple. Initially, sides seem to be taken along gender lines, but that reverses as each member of the separating couple finds new relationships. Is it fatal to the other marriage? Watch and see.

This film is filled with annoying, ridiculous dialogue. Dennis Quaid tries his cute, charming routine again just like he did in the 80s before he mysteriously stopped getting roles. Go figure. Its easy to see why Meg left him after watching this performance. After a couple scenes I began wondering if these people work or not because all they do is sit around in their fancy homes and sip wine or coffee. Kinnear is about as annoying as Quaid which makes this quite a painful exercise to sit through. I could see this being an enjoyable, insightful play with four "talented" actors.

Dinner with Friends is somewhat unusual. Perhaps I''m just not as well-versed as I thought, but I haven't seen other movies about two couples that are friends, one splits up and its effect on the other couple.

This movie obviously originates as a stage play as it consists of four people sitting around and talking. As such, you can only make it so interesting, visually.

Because of this, the movie relies pretty much exclusively on the dialog and actors to make things interesting, and they mostly deliver. There were a few moments where the acting seemed very stage-style, for lack of a better term, but still decent overall.

I would caution you that you won't like this movie if you can't connect with the source material. It's a study of marriages and why some work and others don't as well as the effects of a divorce on friends. I would recommend it mostly to people who have had long- term relationships and/or are interested in them.