The Dinner (2017)

Here's a scene from The Trip--the longer, TV version--in which Steve Coogan does an impression of Richard Gere:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3YH5USzz14

It wasn't a slam against Gere, but I suppose it might have made it awkward when Coogan starred with Gere in The Dinner (2017).

I watched the movie knowing nothing about it. I do that a lot. I find plot developments more surprising than I probably should, but it makes them more interesting.

Steve Coogan plays a former teacher forced to quit due to mental illness. He has a wife (Laura Linney) and teenage son (Charlie Plummer). His brother played by Richard Gere is a member of Congress. He's married and has two teenage sons, one white, and an adopted black kid. Rebecca Hall plays his wife, Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick and Miles J. Harvey play his sons.

The two couples go to dinner together to figure out what to do about their sons. They committed a horrible crime and posted video of it online. They haven't been caught yet, but the parents have to decide what to so.

It's frustrating to watch people trying to deal with the obnoxious mentally ill character.

I haven't read the novel by Dutch writer Herman Koch, but I wonder if it was more ambiguous than this movie. The parents or at least the mothers keep saying that the boys are "good boys" who made a mistake.

"You would have done the same thing," the son tells his mentally ill father which might be a clue as to what's wrong with them.

Maybe a reason you should have more than one child. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

It could be a double feature with Barbet Schroder's Before and After. Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson play parents whose teenage son is accused of murdering his girlfriend. They don't know if he's guilty. When the father comes home and tells his wife he got rid of some evidence, she points out he may have destroyed evidence that their son was innocent.

Coogan does a very good American accent. It starts with him in voice-over and I didn't recognize it as his voice at first.

Available on Netflix.