Writer/director Barry Levinson may have won an Oscar for Rain Man, and he may have a wide range of great movies in his filmography, but something tells me he will always be a guy from Baltimore. That’s mostly because some of his first few movies were set there, such as the somewhat autobiographical Diner. Diner was actually his first feature, and if George Lucas could find success mining his own childhood for cinematic success with American Graffiti, then Levinson could easily do the same.
Look, I try to open these with an anecdote, and that’s the best I could come up with for Diner. It’s a pleasant movie and all, but the only reason I opted to watch it was it was leaving HBO Max at the end of June, and it is still Levinson’s first movie.
Actually, much like American Graffiti, this movie basically follows six friends as they hang out and deal with life. They don’t always stick together as they go about their lives, but for the most part, they do their own thing and have their own problems. Eddie (Steve Guttenberg) is getting ready for his New Year’s Eve wedding, but he isn’t sure he wants to get married at all while holding his fiancee to a test of her football knowledge to see if he will marry her. Shrevie (Daniel Stern) is married to Beth (Ellen Barkin), but he’s not satisfied with married life for reasons he can’t quite explain. Boogie (Mickey Rourke) is a wannabe smoothie who may be working his way through law school while making foolish bets on sporting events. Fenwick (Kevin Bacon) comes from a rich family and is largely directionless after dropping out of college. Billy (Tim Daly) wants to convince a woman he impregnated (Kathryn Dowling) that he will marry her because he loves her and not out of some feeling of obligation. And Modell (PauL Reiser), well, he’s there too.
That actually quite an impressive cast. It turns out this was a first feature credit for Barkin, Daly, and Reiser too.
I think this is what might be termed a “hang out” movie. The plot is loose, and it’s mostly there to spend time with the characters that, hopefully, the audience likes enough to spend two hours with. For the most part, this is true. These young men are, for the most part, directionless, and they behave accordingly. Boogie tricks a girl into grabbing his genitals by poking his penis through a popcorn box at a movie theater. Shrevie flips out on his wife for not knowing the filing system for his record collection. Fenwick gets drunk and sets himself up in his underwear in a church nativity scene. And, of course, Eddie seems to care more for the Baltimore Colts than he does for his never-seen fiancee Elyse. But these are young men, and part of the movie is about their outgrowing some of this sort of behavior.
See, this is a coming-of-age movie, sort of. By the time it ends, the young men will have reflected on their lives and seem to come out of it more mature than when they started. It’s done in small ways, but it does suggest that maybe these guys know they can’t be a bunch of kids forever. Between that and the look and soundtrack of the movie, it does create a nice place to visit while showing that sometimes being an adult means more than just hanging out at a busy diner with your childhood friends. It means, well, doing things you need to do to while being responsible for yourself and others and not just blindly following childhood obsessions. That’s a lesson I think a lot of people can learn, and it does look like these guys learn that.
Well, maybe not Modell. I’m not all that sure what his whole deal was aside from being there.
Grade: A-
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