Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #221 Melvin Goes to Dinner (2003)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m about halfway through the complete filmography troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the world of Oliver Stone for one of you beautiful people as well.
My patron-funded jaunt through the filmmaking career of national treasure Bob Odenkirk ends with a beginning. Odenkirk made his feature-length directorial debut with 2003’s Melvin Goes to Dinner, a low-budget adaptation of writer/editor/star Michael Blieden’s play Phyro-Giants! that’s part of the Dinnerverse along with Louis Malle’s 1981 arthouse classic My Dinner With Andre, another fine film about people sitting at a table talking about life’s grand and not so grand issues while consuming food.
Melvin Goes to Dinner has all the folks you expect and hope to see in a Bob Odenkirk production, including Jack Black, David Cross, Scott Aukerman, Laura Kightlinger, Jerry Minor, Maura Tierney, Scott Adsit, Odenkirk himself and Fred Armisen but it also has bonus random famous people like real-life exes James Gunn and Jenna Fischer.
But otherwise Melvin Goes to Dinner is a marked departure from the films we’ve covered in this series so far, like Run, Ronnie, Run, Let’s Go to Prison, Girlfriend’s Day and The Brothers Solomon.
Where Run, Ronnie, Run, Let’s Go to Prison and The Brothers Solomon are high-concept and wacky, laugh-hungry and rooted in Odenkirk’s background in sketch, Melvin Goes to Dinner is defiantly theatrical, a quintessential low-concept independent movie that’s about a whole lot more than making audiences guffaw.
Though Odenkirk opens things up with jump cuts and photo montages and copious flashbacks he’s not particularly concerned with hiding the film’s stage roots. To call the film is talky is less pejorative than descriptive.
For a first time filmmaker with a background in a much broader, less character-based style of comedy Odenkirk has tremendous faith in his leads, all holdovers from the Los Angeles production of the play, and the material. That faith is rewarded with universally fine, nuanced and lived-in performances from actors who’ve inhabited these characters, on a soul-deep level, in multiple mediums.
As the titular supper-attender, Blieden makes fuzzy aimlessness messily compelling as a stoner ambling sideways through an extra-marital affair with a married woman played by a high-strung Melora Walters. Walters’ presence and Michael Penn’s melancholy, magnificent score lend the film an unmistakable Magnolia quality as it steers sharply to an ending at once oddly abrupt and unexpectedly powerful.
The film’s plot finds Melvin having dinner with his friend Joey (Matt Price), Alex (Stephanie Courtney) and Sarah (Annabelle Gurwitch), a woman whose connection to Joey does not become clear until late in the film.
The conversation flows freely along with the liquor as the quartet tell stories about themselves that overlap and divert in unexpected as well as expected ways. Distinguished alum from the Odenkirk repertory company pop up at a steady clip to provide regular explosions of star power, most notably Black in a scene-stealing cameo as a mental patient convinced he’s the “Creatress” of the universe and its supreme intellect. Black’s space cadet sounds so confident and sure of himself that you almost want to believe him despite his story representing the purest possible form of insanity.
Melvin Goes to Dinner grows progressively darker and rawer as it progresses, as dinner table chatter about religion and relationships gives way to a dark night of the soul that finds the chatty foursome confronting their darkest sins and the consequences of their misdeeds.
If Courtney’s face looks familiar even if her name does not ring a bell that’s because the world knows and reluctantly tolerates her by a different moniker: Flo from Progressive. That’s right, the ubiquitous advertising pitch-woman is one of the stars of Melvin Goes to Dinner, and appears in Girlfriend’s Day and The Brothers Solomon as well.
The downside to creating an advertising icon for the ages like Flo from Progressive is that audiences are always going to associate you with that character no matter the context. So I will confess here that even when Courtney is very ably delivering a harrowing monologue about death and guilt and addiction, my stupid lizard brain was thinking, “Wow, this is a VERY heavy, dramatic speech that Flo from Progressive is delivering! Her colleagues at the insurance company will be impressed!”
From the vantage point of 2021 Melvin Goes to Dinner is a fascinating anomaly in Odenkirk’s checkered but sometimes impressive filmography. With the assistance of a deftly chosen cast and some all-star ringers Odenkirk proved himself an assured arthouse auteur.
Film festival fare ended up suiting Odenkirk’s talents as a hungry filmmaker far better than the gay panic-based humor of Run, Ronnie, Run and Let’s Go to Prison even if Odenkirk would make his most enduring mark in the years and decades ahead as an actor rather than a film director.
Despite Odenkirk’s fame Melvin Goes to Dinner is not available for streaming anywhere. In order to see it you need to procure an ancient artifact known as a “DVD” that you then put into an old-old-time contraption called a “DVD player” in order to watch it.
That’s a shame because it’s the best film Odenkirk has directed and shows off a much different side of his skill set than the broad comedies that he made for big studios. The fad-chasing Jack Posobiecs don’t know anything about Melvin Goes to Dinner, or as he would probably call it, Ralph Does Brunch, but us Bob-heads/Oden-kooks know that it’s one of the real winners in his filmography and at the very least deserves to be as well known, if not much better known, than the films Odenkirk has made that are notorious for being terrible, such as Run, Ronnie, Run and Let’s Go to Prison.
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