Movie Review : Dinner in America (2020)
One of the worst thing that can happen to a young person is to let someone else decide who you are. If you let a narrative you're uncomfortable with run long enough, it will become the prism through which everybody will understand you. Whether you're deemed to be shy, fragile and incapable of doing things alone or difficult, volatile and untrustworthy, no one will invest the time and effort to understand you beyond this arbitrary frame. This will become how you exist in the world.
The worst part about this is that it happens all the time and it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy without a second opinion. Adam Rehmeier’s movie Dinner in America is quite simple, but it explores the how life-changing it can be to meet someone who sees something different in you.
Dinner in America tells the story of angry punk rocker Simon (Kyle Gallner). who's adrift after being kicked out of a paid clinical trial and Patty (Emily Skeggs), an awkward young woman who may or may not have autism. They meet one another when Patty helps Simon to escape the police and quickly develop a strange fascination for one another. She's not repulsed by his violent and antagonistic ways like the others and he's not trying to decide anything for her like everyone else in her life.
Conformity and The Feeling That You Are Defective
In Dinner in American, Simon is identified early as angry and volatile and Patty as slow and cumbersome, but neither really are. The problem that controls their lives is that they’re living in an homogenous environment which their presence alone upsets. No one wants to deal with Simon and his wired energy, so his answer is hostility. No one wants to deal with Patty becoming an adult, so she projects a childlike identity while nurturing a secret life she believes no one cares about.
Simon and Patty feel defective, but they’re just different from their oppressively bland surroundings. What makes Dinner in America such a powerful (and rewatchable) movie is that we don’t have this information at the start either. They both behave in a manner to confirm expectations because expectations have shaped their identities. When Patty reacts in a way to Simon's transgressions with excitement instead of fear and hostility, it unlocks something in both of them.
Dinner in America is going to challenge your own conformity because it will take some time before you shed the impression that Simon is taking advantage of Patty. And why wouldn't you? They live in a town full of stereotypes and they react accordingly at first. But Simon and Patty nurse a flame within one another that grows over time, which is the awkwardly romantic and profound for a film that looks like a mid-00’s comedy. I love it when movies lead me astray like this.
Movies, Romance and The Fucked Up Ideas They Give Us
My favorite nuance in Dinner in America — a film that is anything, but nuanced on the surface — is that it questions and deconstructs one of the most potent ideas peddled by romantic comedies: that you have to fall in love with the most beautiful and most charismatic person in the room. That your outlook on the object of your desire is the only thing that matters, when it's clearly not. A relationship is a two-way mirror. The other person has to be fascinated with you (for who you really are) as much as you are fascinated with them.
Neither Simon. nor Patty satisfy the normative standards for beauty or charisma, but they are within the standards of one another and that’s the only important part about being in a relationship with someone. Although it is often a cream-pie-to-the-face comedy (and a quite excellent at that) Dinner in America also reflects something more profound about the nature of romantic relationships: you can love people for who they are, but you can also love them because you see who they can be.
This idea is as powerful as anything I’ve experienced this year.
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The presentation for Dinner in America doesn't do justice to the actual movie, although it couldn't really have presented itself any other way. It's a raunch romantic comedy that energetically deconstruct the other as an object of desire. It's simple in a way and sophisticated in another and this contradiction makes it unique and life-affirming. It makes you feel that you can also swerve around stereotypes and expectations to find actual meaning to your life and films that make you feel this way are rare.
8.6/10
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