Dinner With Friends
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Dinner With Friends shows how the collapse of Beth and Tom’s marriage affects Karen and Gabe’s. It’s true that couples become invested in each other’s success and are hurt–and often enraged–by the news of failure. A cynic might suggest there’s a gigantic conspiracy to pretend marriages can work. But more likely the anger is a way of expressing fear: how will I stand it if this painful thing happens to me? Still, this observation isn’t fresh or penetrating enough to sustain an entire evening.
Perhaps Margulies knows this, because he glances briefly at another, more complicated truth: that friends who stand in for family are as apt to betray and disappoint as real family members. People close enough to love you are close enough to hurt you. Or as Beth tells Karen, “Congratulations: you’ve managed to create a family as fucked-up and fallible as the one you were born with.” Families of any sort confer obligation as well as privilege, and where there’s duty there are always shirkers.
It’s possible, though, that the problem is not the lines but their delivery. Margulies’s work is a souffle, easily collapsed by production errors: his brilliant Sight Unseen comes off like a tired Catskills routine when not directed perfectly. Perhaps a more simpatico Beth and Tom and a less colorless Gabe and Karen would have offered fresh insights into marriage. But as it stands, you’re better off spending your time having–well, you know.
