Recovered Classic: Diner


Long before Quentin Tarantino made the big screen fizz with scintillating coffee shop banter, a different band of fast-tongued, sharp-suited young Americans ruled the roost. The unlikely architect was Barry Levinson. His immensely enjoyable 1982 directorial debut Diner has established itself as something of a hipster classic, brilliantly evoking life in 1959 Baltimore as it follows the lives of a group of friends coping with crossing over into adulthood.

Based on Levinson’s own Oscar-nominated script, the film’s dazzling cast were a bunch of mere unknowns when it was released, but the likes of Kevin Bacon, Daniel Stern, Paul Reiser, Mickey Rourke (when he could act), Steve Guttenberg and Ellen Barkin all display obvious promise and show just why (in most cases) they went on to build successful careers.

Centred around the upcoming marriage of a guy called Eddie (Guttenberg), the wedding is used as a catalyst for the main characters to assess their lives. There’s Boogie (Rourke) a gambler and ladies man with debts to pay off; Fenwick (Bacon) an irresponsible upper-class drunk with attitude problems; Shrevie (Stern) who’s married to Barkin but wonders why they ever tied the knot; and Billy (Timothy Daly) who’s in love with a woman who doesn’t want to marry him, even though she’s pregnant.

What Levinson does so effectively is draw the audience in to such an extent that watching the film is like spending quality time with an old friend. The action drifts casually between the characters, but because the performances are so darned good, they quickly establish themselves as people you really care about. So you inevitably end up warming to them remarkably quickly, despite their obvious flaws.

The scenes set in the diner (where they regularly meet to consider and generally disagree on life, the universe and everything) are clearly a highlight, when subjects such as who’s better, Johnny Mathis or Frank Sinatra, are hotly debated. But there are so many scenes to revel in that picking a favourite is no easy feat. There’s Guttenberg quizzing his fiancée on American football before he agrees to marry her, Rourke attempting to win an outrageous bet in a cinema, a drunken Bacon getting into a bundle with a life-size nativity, Stern chastising his wife after she files one of his prized records in the wrong place, the list is endless.

With so many characters and traits to concentrate on, some individuals are inevitably underdeveloped and sacrificing one of them would have alleviated this problem. For my money, dumping Daly’s character would have allowed more screen time for the wonderful Reiser, whose constant bickering with Guttenberg is a joy to watch.

But Levinson gets everything else spot-on, deftly handling the angst of young American men behaving badly and peppering scenes with some moments of genuine hilarity, while still acknowledging the more unpleasant aspects of young male behaviour.

Apart from the merits of the script and the performances, Diner is also a film which pays acute attention to period detail (the cars, oh the cars) with the blistering soundtrack, not to mention the clothes, all contributing to a superbly convincing depiction of time and place.

Surely one of the best movies of the 1980s and one which Levinson has rarely come close to bettering.

David Lichtneker

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