Sign up for our Email Newsletters here. Instead of coherence, let alone fun, the film offers up a few spot-on recreations of Villechaize’s most famous scenes (and co-stars) while aimlessly telling two stories connected by one fateful dinner. ... “My Dinner with Hervé” is a paint-by-numbers biopic that subscribes to the overused and often offensive cliché that someone’s death is required for a protagonist to straighten … In the UK, I would hazard, we really only know Hervé Villechaize as the evil henchman Nick Nack in the Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun. One problem with cutting back-and-forth like this is there’s not enough separation between who Hervé was then and who he is today. An occupational hazard, perhaps, when you have a journalist writing and directing a film about his own interview, but one that should have been guarded against more zealously. Copyright © 2020 Penske Business Media, LLC. Villechaize’s death shortly after the interview turns it effectively into a suicide note. David Strathairn in “My Dinner With Hervé”.
My Dinner with Hervé review – a glorious and tragic romp in 90s Lalaland 4 / 5 stars 4 out of 5 stars. Unfortunately, so little of whatever sparked their persistent interest makes it to the screen. People do bad things and don’t learn from them, or they do learn, but it’s unclear how.
Sometimes the traditional tropes used to massage My Dinner with Hervé into a movie - lessons are learned, mistakes are acknowledged, cringeworthy closure is achieved - don't work. Villechaize is played by Peter Dinklage, most widely known for his seven years as “the Imp” Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones, but revered ever since his breakthrough in The Station Master and unmistakable even in such soapy madness as Nip/Tuck, where he got Joely Richardson to lift her leaden game as her nanny-cum-inamorato Marlowe Sawyer. “My Dinner With Hervé” exists because two people shared a passion for the story they either lived through (Gervasi) or were inspired by (Dinklage). Villechaize as written is a glorious part – poignant as he wrestles with the limitations placed on him by others and infuriating as he spurns the help of those trying to save him from himself – even if it was far less fun in real life. Directed by Sacha Gervasi. Despite a disturbing childhood — where Hervé’s father put him through life-risking surgeries in the vain hope adult organs would help him grow taller — any sympathy for the lead runs out when his rare challenges are pushed aside for another toxic celebrity story; it wasn’t his parents who screwed him up, it was Hollywood! In real life, Gervasi’s interview with Villechaize lasted a week. From a performance standpoint, however, Peter Dinklage gives a memorable and moving showing as the very sad and regretful Villechaize. Though it’s made known he did something bad enough to a) put himself on the wagon, and b) lose his wife and child, “My Dinner With Hervé” holds back what he did until near the end of the movie. All rights reserved. Sure, he was famous for a spell, but in a movie that damns celebrity as much as it glorifies it, his notoriety can’t be the only reason to watch. Not even a “Station Agent”–level turn could turn this harsh look at Villechaize empathetic, but Dinklage does what he can amid many tonal problems, some of the most nonsensical dialogue outside of congressional hearings, and Gervasi’s flat framings. ET on HBO.
Reviews My Dinner with Hervé Odie Henderson October 19, 2018.
“My Dinner With Hervé” airs Saturday, October 20 at 8 p.m. Peter Dinklage and Andy Garcia in “My Dinner with Herve”, There’s Hervé, of course, but then there’s also Danny Tate, a fictionalized reporter who serves as a stand-in for Gervasi himself (who interviewed Villechaize shortly before his death). But to its pressing detriment, the new HBO biopic downplays any empathetic characteristics whatsoever, to the point where viewers may wonder why this actor was notable at all. It’s a slightly crass decision that does the film, its actors (and Dornan does fine work here, too, managing not to be effaced in a more straightforward role by Dinklage’s tour de force) and its subject a disservice. In the past, you’ll see him chase his terrified wife through their yard, gun in hand. Get The Latest IndieWire Alerts And Newsletters Delivered Directly To Your Inbox. My Dinner with Hervé mostly works. It is condensed in the film into one night. With Peter Dinklage, Jamie Dornan, Frida Munting, Harriet Walter. With just a rudimentary bit of research, one can see that Villechaize worked extensively with troubled children, helping abuse victims cope with tragedy and speaking with depressed teenagers about suicide. Villechaize’s mother went into labour with him as she was driving an ambulance through a bomb raid on Paris in 1943 and blamed this for ever after forthe fact that her son was born with dwarfism. He may even be an Emmy lock already.
She essentially rejected him while his father tried obsessively to cure him with variously traumatic experimental treatments. 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That’s not enough to hold up an entire feature, or even a good dinner conversation. Peter Dinklage and Jamie Dornan in “My Dinner With Hervé”, Hervé Villechaize, the artist best known for playing Nick Nack in “The Man With the Golden Gun” and Tattoo on the TV show “Fantasy Island,” may have been a decent man. Sure, he wants his family back, but much of his behavior can’t be blamed on the alcohol or the withdrawals. Toronto Film Festival What to Watch Now Movie Reviews TV Reviews Roundtables Podcasts 'My Dinner With Hervé': Film Review 12:57 PM PDT 10/19/2018 by Sheri Linden Worse yet, after Hervé is intended to have his come-to-Jesus moment, he throws it all away so he can…sound…cool? That there was surely no other choice for the role may in part reflect how little things have changed in Lalaland from Villechaize’s time – when there was only ever room in the spotlight for one actor with such a disability – but is mostly down to Dinklage’s bottomless talent. Who would count the days if it’s good?”) despite the temptations offered by his hard-drinking, pill-popping interviewee, and to redeem himself in the eyes of his betrayed wife back home. My Dinner with Hervé is an account of the then journalist Gervasi’s meeting 50 years later with that abused and loveless boy who had by then – as is disproportionately often the way – become a once-adored, now washed-up star of the big and small screen. My Dinner With Herve is a film about the life and death of Hervé Villechaize, star of Fantasy Island. (There’s not a lot of formal courageousness here, and shots that include a writer typing the title of the movie at the end of the movie show Gervasi isn’t trying to forge a fresh style.). In the US, however, he was famous – wildly so during its late-70s peak – for playing Tattoo, the frenetic sidekick to Ricardo Montalban’s suave Mr Roarke in the long-running series Fantasy Island. In the present, he’s crumpling up $10 bills and tossing them gleefully at naked dancers. Hervé tells Danny about his life, and his flashbacks are intermittently interrupted by random, real-time shenanigans — like dropping by a strip club or commandeering a limousine. The mercurial Dinklage peels back layer upon layer of self-delusion, revisionist history (he tells Danny that the Bond premiere transformed his relationship with his mother; really, she left, unable to bear the audience laughing at her “freak” son), charm, desperation and sorrow as they travel through 90s LA in search of, in Danny’s case answers and a good lede, and in Villechaize’s case a good – or at least distracting – time. ‘My mother always used to say I was Hitler’s fault.” Thereby hangs a tale, and writer-director Sacha Gervasi sets out to tell it in My Dinner with Hervé (Sky Atlantic), an HBO biopic about the James Bond actor Hervé Villechaize. 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Now, he’s double-fisting drinks in the hope Danny hops off the wagon and joins him, ruining his sobriety and costing him any shot of reuniting with his family, not to mention keeping his job.
Interviews with leading film and TV creators about their process and craft. ET on HBO. Dinklage, meanwhile, deserves praise for consistently capturing a tricky accent and grounding a pretty nasty character in enough charisma to make him tolerable.
Certainly as a performer, the famous dwarf knew how to entertain the masses, even going so far as to play Oscar the Grouch on “Sesame Street.”. All rights reserved. Peter Dinklage is brilliant in this tale of Hervé Villechaize’s ‘suicide note’ interview – it’s just a shame the journalist ends up centre-stage, Mon 22 Oct 2018 22.30 BST
From there, the film adopts your classic “as told to” story structure. At worst, he’s a bossy ex-boyfriend and a pretty bad reporter whose realization of as much feels unearned, and thus, impermanent.
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