My Dinner with Hervé (2018)

☆ ☆ ☆

My Dinner with Hervé (2018) – S. Gervasi

A biopic of Hervé Villechaize (played by Peter Dinklage) told on the eve of his death in 1993 by suicide.  The film follows a young reporter (Jamie Dornan) for a British magazine who is given the Villechaize assignment (in conjunction with a more important interview with Gore Vidal) as penance for erratic behaviour due to alcohol and drugs.  When we meet Danny Tate, he’s on the wagon and hoping to reunite with his wife and infant son (who left him after a drunken affair).  The Vidal interview is his chance to redeem himself but after his dinner with Villechaize takes a bit too long, Vidal walks out.  So, Tate returns to Hervé who has promised a great story.  Instead, it’s the promise of a debauched night in a white limousine and strip clubs in L. A. which is not exactly appreciated.  Dinklage plays Villechaize to the hilt but with a great deal of compassion (you can’t help but wonder about his own similar experiences).  Most of the film is told in flashback as Hervé tells his life story – with The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) and Fantasy Island (1977-1983) as obvious highlights.  I suppose I shouldn’t have watched an HBO film on an airplane, given the necessity of sex and nudity (especially in this story).  But I gritted it out.  As he tells his tale and confronts an ever more disbelieving Tate, Villechaize moves from self-aggrandizement and boasting to self-awareness and acceptance of his own role in his career collapse.  This is the same journey that the reporter also needs to take (and as this is based on a real episode in writer/director Sacha Gervasi’s life, one wonders whether he also resonated with Hervé as his character does).  Dinklage is absorbing here but the film still feels slight somehow – it takes place over just a day or so – and too pat.  I wish it didn’t end with Bittersweet Symphony (however apt).  A curiosity although not without real human feeling.