Dinner with Friends

Gabe: And this market she took us too….
Karen: Emilia took us shopping.
Gabe: Campo de’ Fiori.
Karen: This outdoor market.
Gabe: Fish, produce, you name it.
Karen: So aromatic, so colorful. And the faces!
Gabe: I got some great shots.
Karen: This is someone who’s been cooking for 75 years. Can you imagine?
Gabe: Her relationship to food, it’s so primal, so sexy, really. It gave us a great angle for our piece.
_____

Gabe: Tell her about the pomodoro.
Karen: Plum tomatoes she picked straight out of her garden.
Gabe: You wouldn’t believe how red these tomatoes were. Sweet!
Karen: So soft.
Gabe. Buttery.
Karen: And then she just took them and crushed them in her hands.
Gabe: In her gnarled little hands. It was a riot, this little old lady.


Dinner with Friends is another relationship movie that uses food as a prop. Gabe (Quaid) and Karen (MacDowell) are wife-and-husband food writers and photographers whose world falls apart when their best friends, Tom (Kinnear) and Beth (Collette), decide to divorce. The food really figures only in the first night of action, and it looks and sounds delicious: lamb marinated in lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, rosemary, then seared on the grill; pumpkin risotto; limone mandorle polenta (cake made with eggs, vanilla, lemon, and almond, with polenta substituted for the flour). That’s a dessert to look for!

Released 2001
Directed by Norman Jewison
Written by Donald Margulies

Starring Dennis Quaid as Gabe, Andie MacDowell as Karen, Greg Kinnear as Tom, and Toni Collette as Beth, and Ruth Reichl as herself