Diner (1982, Barry Levinson) (Patreon)

80/100

Umpteenth viewing (albeit my first since 1999), yet I still noticed a crucial element that had somehow previously escaped me. As previously noted, I'm haunted by the scene in which Shrevie berates Beth for misfiling his records, in large part because I recognize some of my own personal failings in his obnoxious behavior. We're both obsessive cataloguers. But here's what I missed, until now: So is Beth. To some degree, at least. She doesn't give a damn what's on the flip side, or memorize which record label issued what single...but as the gang files out of A Summer Place (following Boogie's popcorn-box ploy, which no longer seems even remotely amusing), Beth stops to look at the one-sheet, then asks Shrevie whether he's aware that Sloan Wilson, author of the source novel, had also written The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (which had been adapted into a film—a superb one, btw, highly recommended—a few years earlier). Shrevie did not know that, nor does he care. It's an offhand exchange, and it takes place before the big record-collection fight (an expert touch; placing it afterward would be too blatant), but it ain't in the movie by accident. "We got nothin' to talk about," Shrevie laments of Beth, but Levinson makes it clear that this is an assumption on Shrevie's part, and quite likely mistaken.

Diner was released just a few months before I started high school, and while it's very much a period piece, it was also the first film I ever saw that not only accurately reflected but actively reveled in the sort of pointless, time-killing badinage that dominated my own, almost exclusively male friendships at that time. (My version of the film would be called Denny's.) One minor character wanders around reciting dialogue from Sweet Smell of Success (which I wouldn't see for another dozen years), and Levinson would no doubt be delighted to learn that my friends and I similarly memorized entire scenes from Diner, spontaneously asking "You know what word I'm not comfortable with?" during conversational lulls and launching into "You gonna finish that?" at the sight of any half-eaten sandwich. We surely identified with the characters' general discomfort around women, too—say, did I mention that the high school we attended was (and still is, remarkably, nearly 40 years later) all-male?—though we never acted out any of those scenes. Still, I was taken aback, on this viewing, by just how bluntly self-critical a film Diner is, at least until it chickens out in the home stretch. For all its hilarious smack talk, it's fundamentally a portrait of clueless men treating women like dirt—not incidentally, but pervasively. The entire movie is structured around casual, unthinking sexism and misogyny, with the titular diner (in which there are never any female customers, apparently—only waitresses who can be ordered around) serving as a sort of safe space. Previously, I'd focused on e.g. the details of Billy's long-term revenge against a rival high school's baseball team, enjoying that preposterous knuckleheaded anecdote for its own sake. This time, I was nearly in tears watching Beth walk behind the guys, big crooked smile on her face, repeatedly asking "Who's Willard Broxton?"—just wanting to be part of the conversation, to have a basic understanding of what everyone's talking about—and getting completely, utterly ignored. 

Just as I was starting to conclude that Diner is even greater than I'd thought*, however, it methodically redeems its entire dramatis personae over the course of the final reel, reassuring us that these lads were just a tad confused and will eventually figure it out. That feels particularly egregious when it comes to Boogie, whose late-breaking attraction to an equestrian sophisticate in no way excuses his truly appalling behavior throughout the film (even allowing for the fact that he doesn't go through with his scheme to take advantage of Beth's fragility in the most repugnant way imaginable). Rourke's at his early soft-spoken best in the role, and absolutely nails Boogie's earnestly fabricated excuse for the popcorn-box "incident" (which today would be characterized as a form of assault, I think), but the idea that I'm still supposed to feel warmly toward this creep at movie's end now makes me recoil. Shrevie gets let off the hook by virtue of suggesting a vacation in the Poconos, while Eddie's insane football quiz—which is really a touch too ludicrous for the tone that's otherwise established—never really gets questioned by anyone (though I suppose the decision never to show Elyse's face, even at the wedding, is at least somewhat pointed). The less said about Billy's embarrassing piano jam at the strip club, the better; I'd frankly repressed all memory of that, and duly cringed. Only Fenwick remains Fenwick, squandering what's apparently a formidable mind (love the mid-film revelation that he's a walking encyclopedia, and especially love that it subsequently never gets addressed again) on the smile of the week. Another favorite that ultimately lacks the courage of its convictions, but which I still love all the same. And overall it really is much more cutting than I'd realized.

* It's also more formally sophisticated than I'd remembered or would have imagined—quite impressive for a first-time director, really. Think of Levinson staging the argument between Billy and Barbara so that we hear them over a mic in another room, their words competing with and echoing dialogue from a TV monitor (which frames them on the right opposite one of Barbara's coworkers ignoring them on the left). Or the inclusion of a jackhammer when Boogie gets slapped around by his bookie outside the salon—not a noise that's relevant (or that would usually be desired/tolerated; its presence is surely deliberate) in any way save the thematic. Few low-budget talkfests expend that much thought on composition and ostensibly incidental sound design.