Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner

Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner

In a summer filled with reboots and sequels, the documentary “Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner” is not “My Dinner With Andre Part II,” as tempting as that may be (it certainly might help move those sad “Andre” action figures hawked by Corky St. Clair in “Waiting for Guffman”). But it does reunite the famous experimental theater director with his former cinematic dining partner and decades-on artistic collaborator, Wallace Shawn, for another iconoclastic dip into the creative process that looks back on their last cinematic partnership, Louis Malle’s 1994 “Vanya on 42nd Street.”

These are the most satisfying parts of “Before and After Dinner.” Thrilling and electric though they can be which is why they have been made the focus of the documentary’s trailer there is a lot more going on here than meets even this over-analyzing eye.

Directed and narrated by Cindy Kleine, Gregory’s wife, “Before and After Dinner” starts out purporting to be about their unexpected love story. When they met, she was 39 (and had sworn off men, she says for dramatic effect), he 63. Running through the numbers backward so you don’t have to do them yourself while watching the movie when she was born he was getting married to his first wife; when she was 3 he was becoming a father let’s move on to what feels like after-dinner coffee. It’s rehearsals/workshops/performances of Shawn’s adaptation of Ibsen’s “The Master Builder.” They’ve been at it Gregory says for 14 years.

Gregory and ensemble (which include Shawn in title role, Lisa Joyce and Julie Hagerty) do workshopping in apartment setting: fleshing out scenes. As we saw in “Vanya,” Gregory is all about creating a safe environment for the actor. It’s the art of being and not the act of performing. “I create a playground for demented children where there are no mistakes and no judgment,” he says.

Filming him directing, Gregory tells Kleine at one point, would be boring. No way. Watching a scene, his eyes dart intensely, his fists clutch, his hands wave as if he is a conductor; he grunts approvals, pushes and wills his actors on. “All you need is a tiny room and a few friends and you can make a miracle,” he says.

The camera trained on him after this process suggests what effect it had upon it: Shawn cuts short a tete-a-tete with another actor when he sees it.

Even if that were all “Before and After Dinner” was interested in an excellent companion piece to Jonathan Demme’s upcoming film of a performance of “The Master Builder” along the lines of Les Blank’s “Burden of Dreams” which chronicled Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” but wait there is more: Kleine also delves into Gregory’s biography, notably his relationship with his emotionally removed parents. “My theatrical work,” he explains “is an ongoing meditation on the most frightening person in my life; my father.” So not only will aspiring/working actors/directors have an instructive field day with this movie but psychologists too.

As yet another dramatic aside, Kleine chronicles Gregory’s investigation into suspicions that his father collaborated with the Nazis (Paris/Berlin researchers).

But the weakest part of “Before and After Dinner” is Kleine’s contemplation on their relationship. She says that she had a lot in common with Gregory because they both came from crazy families (Her previous film was “Phyllis and Harold,” a documentary about her parents, and there’s a framed poster of it hanging on the wall behind her throughout this one).

Kleine is essential to Gregory’s story, but he distracts from her by talking about himself too much or rather, talking around himself, forever circling closer to some sort of self-understanding while telling stories about “The Master Builder” or his dad or his childhood, which he claims was like living in The Shining.

Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy listening to him talk. I do. He’s 79 years old and still hilarious and brilliant and endlessly fascinating. As Roger Ebert once said of Wally Shawn (Gregory’s co-star in My Dinner With Andre), “He is a spellbinding conversationalist.” Gregory might be even more so. At one point, he tells us about auditioning for Martin Scorsese for the part of John the Baptist in The Last Temptation of Christ. It involves nudity and madness; you’ll have to hear him tell it.

“Before and After Dinner” is packed with archival interview footage; rare clips from his legendary 1970 production of Alice In Wonderland; film clips (including some cringe-inducing moments from his appearances in Protocol opposite Goldie Hawn and Demolition Man); revealing moments where he sings or dances or recites poetry; scenes that literally strip him bare.

It isn’t My Dinner With Andre; it isn’t as good as My Dinner With Andre, but it does leave you with a sense of having spent time with an explorer someone who has lived many lives, made many things, failed spectacularly at other and who is still, after all these years, hungry for more.

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