Reel Love Fest 2021: Dinner in America
What does the budget for an independent film and the cost of dinner have in common? Not much, except both will probably run you more than you might think; 1.7 million versus 6% of your monthly income according to USA Today—or $17 per person if you're dining out. It's a price-tag up and coming filmmakers fight tooth and nail over just to reach the “Hollywood Dream” of having their film come to fruition—4 out of 5 films entered into Sundance will likely land distribution deals—while millions of Americans on a budget fight to just eek out a decent meal. That tooth and nail can be felt dragging across the skin of writer-director Adam Rehmeier's anarchist punk coming of age film Dinner in America, not just in the ways the director cuts coupons by both editing and writing his third feature, but in the way his characters set flame to suburban conservatism in what amounts to one of the most biting films to come out of Trump's America.
When we first meet Simon (Kyle Gallner), a pyro-fixated punk rocker on the lamb for a litany of felonies—the opening act sees a wall of flames outside a suburban home after a chance Sunday dinner goes comically awry—he's drug-drooling over a cafeteria tray of food in a failed attempt to participate in a study for a meager $17.50. While ditching a patrol car, Simon stumbles upon Patty (Emily Skeggs), an awkward young woman with a fascination for writing weekly love poems sent with a Polaroid snapshot of her masturbating to anonymous lead singer John Q. Public of the fictional band, Psyops. Simon's crass, vulgar and wired to explode with every lingering gaze left on his gutter-dragged mohawk, yet when Patty takes him home to her parents (played with razor wit by Pat Healy and Mary Lynn Rajskub), he begins to show a softer side to his boorish manner, one that may have found love in the most unexpected of places.
Dinner in America has all the trappings of a backyard incendiary device, a Molotov cocktail where the ignition is the tattered remains of an American flag. Rehemier chooses not to pepper his script with political buzzwords or catch-all phrases, instead liberally seasoning dialogue with homophobic and racial slurs that roll off the tongues of his characters with startling ease. After all, these archetypes exist in a hate-bubble inflated by the Trump administration, whose red carpet has been rolled out on the backs of the marginalized for four years. And while Dinner in America doesn't look to make clear-cut distinctions between its characters—Simon's rage is very much an extension of privilege—the vitriolic spatting of “retard” as a verbal weapon against Patty is just one of the ways Rehemier separates us from them, demonstrating how the right has weaponized hate speech as a normalcy.
Except none of the political rancor would matter if it wasn't delivered with conviction, which just about every character does so with seemingly unbridled ease. Kyle Gallner, whose early start on Veronica Mars captured a particular youthfulness that dismissed callowness, sheds his boyish charm in place of a cut physic and exhaustive eyes that demonstrate an actor who has come into his own like a kick-drum to the face. His delivery of lines such as "I was counting on that scratch, man!" as well as a heartfelt lie about doing missionary work in Tanzania feels cogent as well as comedic, taking the gruffness of a pair of worn Doc Martens and marrying it with the sincerity of a Ramones song. This is a performance that commands authority in the same vein Joseph Gordon Levitt did in 2010's Hesher; a far more nihilistic dark comedy with a much weaker snarl.
Then there's Emily Skeggs, the breakout and Tony Award winning star of Broadway's Fun Home, an adaptation of Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir that garnered critical attention in 2006. Skeggs embodies Patty with a strange brew of mannerisms that feel far less Napoleon Dynamite and much more Elias from Clerks 2, right down to the way she churns thoughts over before inquisitively pressing the subject further with a childlike whim. What makes Patty feel like a character is how Skeggs' nurtures the material in a way that embodies discovery, from wondering what a vice is to observing the decay of a dead cat rotting away on her parents lawn.
One of the key scenes that exhibits the dynamic pliability of these two actors comes halfway through, when Simon takes Patty to the home of his affluent and uptight conservative parents who he's been estranged from because of his rampant drug use. It's here where they cut and record a raw yet deliriously infectious track that features Patty embracing a voice that feels so angelically pristine, laid dormant for far too long. "Finding the balance for Dinner in America was somewhere in between, straddling chaotic and tender moments." Rehmeier told DropBox, and watching these two outcasts layer instrumentals behind yearning wide eyes is akin to that moment in every coming-of-age tale, where love blooms and lays waste to everything around it like an atomic rebel yell.
Capturing these foils of the American Dream is cinematographer Jean-Philippe Bernier (Turbo Kid), who brings a wide lens to the cul-de-sacs of America, and in doing so takes in green pastures as if these are lands to be conquered. And in many ways they are, as red, white and blues lay scattered here and there, never over-saturating the background yet signifying a tectonic shift in patriotic allegory. Coupled with a pill-popping electronic score by John Swihart (Napoleon Dynamite) that drones like the flies above a dead cat, and the artistic flourishes of production designer Francesca Palombo—who pulls references from American artist Richard Corman to emphasize the cultural pastiche of suburban decay—Dinner in America is both a scathing indictment of the Trump era as well as a darkly comedic rally cry of punk love that audiences need now more than ever.
