I recounted some story I got off of a documentary about a screening of Diner – and now I read that James Wolcott was there at that screening back in 1982. Exciting!
Yup. The love for Diner rolls on.
I got together with Ted last night and we had a great talk about the movie. Ted was raving about Kevin Bacon and how good he was … I forget the exact word Ted used for Bacon’s performance. Was it my third glass of wine that has obliterated the memory? Ted loved, in particular, the scene where Kevin Bacon stages his own death early in the movie, tipping the car over and lying dead and bloody for his friends to come upon him.
I love when Bacon gets wasted (well, he’s wasted through the whole thing) and punches out the Wise Men in the nativity scene on the church lawn. It’s so absurd.
But then I love the counterpoint scene of Bacon sitting by himself in his apartment, shouting out the answers to a television quiz show questions. “HERODOTUS. HERODOTUS.” or “THOREAU.” He gets very little joy out of being right, he’s more contemptuous of the ones who didn’t get the answer than anything else … but I just love how Bacon plays that scene. You realize: Huh. This guy has some gifts I hadn’t seen before. He’s sharp, quick, not just a self-destructive mess. I wonder what happened to him. I wonder why he is so lost.
That’s all because of how Bacon plays it.
Well, and how it’s written, of course.
Wolcott writes:
At first the movie didn’t quite click. The rhythms seemed disjointed, the staging of the fake car wreck didn’t quite work, there was a sense that we might be witnessing yet another Americanized version of Fellini’s I Vitelloni gone askew, but then came the diner-booth scene where the characters converged and fell into place and the hilarious argument over the sandwich escalated into a guy spat and from then on Rourke and his smooth moves seemed to contour the entire movie to the bittersweet fade.
Diner fans – go read Wolcott’s piece.
I think that scene with Bacon tipping over his car is a crucial one. Levinson sets it up so that you’ll think it’s going to venture forth on this tragic route (maybe the rest of the film will be flashbacks to what their lives were like before this terrible accident? — which is what I thought upon my initial viewing), so it’s such a clever, jocular sidestep. Love it.
Also, the scene with Bacon and his suburb-situated brother! (I’m paraphrasing here), but the “asshole in the other bed”.
Aaron – thanks for the comment! I remember my first time seeing it, too – and the camera kind of swoops around the corner in the road, and you get that eerie shot of the car tipped over. Horrible. So when his friends get mad at him (briefly) and refuse to help him tip it back over – I relate to them, because he had fooled me too.
I love that scene with the brother. It’s really painful.
I always liked the part where Rourke intentionally goes riding on the posted property in order to get the girl and of course she rides out and asks him if he knows he is trespassing and he just looks at her and says, Yeah, I know.
Or something like that. It’s been over a quarter century since I saw the film as the prelude to the Pittsburgh premier of E.T.
As we exited there were attendants giving out pin buttons that read: I saw E.T. I declined to take one because I was above succumbing to such gimmickry then. But now of course I realize my mistake.
Anyway, I thought then Diner was a superb movie and I liked it even better than the other one everyone had come for. Mine was then and likely remains the minority opinion, but one thing’s for sure. That was one great day at the theater in Pittsburgh.
Yes, such a great night out! Sadly, I forget the exact word I used too – and I used it. Sad but true. I have many images in my memory of Bacon’s character laughing, but never being happy. So alone. He’s the guy who no one ever thinks of as an outsider, but who feels that he is.
So many great little things in the film. Big Earl, who eats everything on the left side of the diner menu, and then gets in a little sports car, The guy who walks around the pool hall quoting The Sweet Smell of Success, and who can for get “the smile of the week”.
I loved the quiz show scene too. It felt to me like Fenwick assuring, or comforting, himself that he’s still got something to hold on to, even if he’s in the process of screwing up his life – drunk all the time, trust fund about to run out, somehow alone even when he’s around the guys.
A kind of ‘I could be there, doing what you’re doing if I wanted to, I’m just choosing not to. See?’. It has a real poignancy and pathos to me.
And in some way (maybe because I’m trawling through Mickey Rourke’s back catalogue at the moment!), it echoed for me the “I know who I am” scene in Angel Heart. A man whose life is falling apart in front of him — admittedly in a more literally existential way for Harry Angel — because of stupid choices he’s made, trying desperately to convince himself that he’s really okay.