My Dinner with Herve (2018) * *

Directed by:  Sacha Gervasi

Starring:  Peter Dinklage, Jamie Dornan, David Strathairn, Mireille Enos, Oona Chaplin, Andy Garcia

What My Dinner with Herve gets wrong is its portrait of its subject as a cliché.    In this movie, Herve Villechaize, the diminutive actor famous for his roles in Fantasy Island and The Man with the Golden Gun, is a drunken, bitter has-been who ultimately commits suicide because of the compounding heartbreak he has encountered in his fifty years on the planet.    We've seen tales of woe concerning stars who once had the world for the asking, but then pissed it away.    Herve Villechaize did indeed commit suicide in 1993 at fifty, but the cause was more health-related than anything else.    Herve's body stopped growing, but his internal organs continued to grow unabated, causing ungodly physical pain as they pressed against his bones.    My Dinner with Herve does not mention this condition; instead focusing on the old, overused narrative it employs.    Worse yet, it is told through the eyes of a recovering alcoholic reporter conducting what would turn out to be Herve's last interview.  

My Dinner with Herve is seemingly based on writer-director Gervasi's experiences with Herve in the last days of his life.    The Gervasi character is now Daniel Tate (Dornan), who is thirty days clean and sober after ruining his marriage and nearly his career by drinking.    His editor hands him two assignments:   A hatchet-job interview with Gore Vidal and a fluff piece on Herve Villechaize.   Since both live in Los Angeles, Daniel can do a two-for-one for his employers and get himself back on track.    Daniel makes the mistake of booking both interviews for the same night.    When his dinner with Herve runs long, Gore Vidal bails on the interview after Daniel arrives nearly thirty minutes late.    Herve then contacts Daniel again, inviting him to a limo ride into the debauchery-laden LA nightlife and giving him an in-depth interview at the same time.     Daniel, still pissed at himself for screwing up the Vidal interview, reluctantly goes along and makes his displeasure with his subject apparent as they visit strip clubs and Herve drunkenly crashes the limo. 

We learn of Herve's sad life, peppered by momentary glimpses of happiness thanks to his brief brush with fame.    He was born with dwarfism, raised by a loving father and a cold mother who resented Herve's condition, and travels to America in search of stardom.    A talented painter, Herve eschews that for acting, and after busting into an agent's office, he is soon booked as the villainous Nick Nack in The Man with the Golden Gun.    While Nick Nack is well-received, Herve doesn't work for another four years, living out of his car when the Fantasy Island role of Tattoo comes along.    Herve says "De plane, de plane" and a star is born.    Within a few short years, that stardom dissipates as Herve drinksto excess, womanizes, and then exhibits jealous, vindictive divo behavior which disrupts the Fantasy Island set and causes him to be fired.   All to excess naturally.

Peter Dinklage does not look like Villechaize, but makes him captivating nonetheless.    With his thick French accent and bravado, Dinklage gives us a fleshed-out portrait of a man who defied the odds by living to fifty, even though doctors assumed he wouldn't live past twenty-five, and becoming a household name despite his size.   We see a man who has his good traits overshadowed and consumed by his negative ones.    He is left with self-inflicted regrets and shouts of "Hey, de plane!" from loud, obnoxious fans in public.   He hates being washed up, and knows that job prospects of a fifty-year-old dwarf in Hollywood are virtually non-existent, especially one with his troubled reputation.

My Dinner with Herve didn't need to hedge its bets by introducing the Daniel character.    He is a cynical dullard who sucks the life out of each scene he's in.    When Daniel returns to his life after his interview with Herve, he is a changed man, and we don't much care.    I can't blame Dornan, who only acts as he was directed, but couldn't someone have thought to breathe life into this ultimately unnecessary character?    Many movies employ the device of having a reporter follow his/her insane subject to the depths of hell, but rarely has it been this ineffective, distracting, and momentum-stopping.    We are left with a Dinklage performance which tempts us with might have been.