A review of the 2001 film with Dennis Quaid, Andie MacDowell, Greg Kinnear, and Toni Collette
Originally published in Counter Arts on Medium on August 8, 2026
I’ve always had a soft spot for films that start as plays, and Dinner with Friends (2001), based on the eponymous Pulitzer Prize–winning play by Donald Margulies, is a winning stage-to-film adaptation. It still includes plenty of dialogue, but the lines drop naturally and without encumbering the scenes. And what I liked about them most was that they added up to truths both hopeful and sad about marriage, creating, in broad yet powerful strokes, the portrait of upper-middle-class people having middle-aged crises.
This cinedrama revolves around two couples, who are almost more than friends — more like a surrogate family, since for many years they get together pretty much every weekend. And then one of those couples gets split really fast by divorce, which threatens to cast a pall over the other marriage as well.
But let’s start with the beginning of the piece. There’s Gabe (Dennis Quaid) and Karen (Andie MacDowell), welcoming Beth (Toni Collette) into their home. There’s ingestion and talk of delicious food from Italy, as Gabe and Karen had just been there for their work as food and travel writers, and then Beth (Toni Collette) suddenly gets very sad and collapses in tears, telling them her husband Tom (Greg Kinnear) has found someone else and will leave her.
Gabe and Karen are stunned by Tom’s infidelity, but Tom seems pretty nonchalant. In fact, he comes to visit his friends later that night, after he learns about the dinner from Beth, but he doesn’t seem to seek understanding, much as he says he does. In fact, he just wants to say his piece too, and when Gabe tries to get a word of reproof edgewise, Tom doesn’t want to hear anything.
Tom seems pretty instinctual in all this. Take, for instance, how, not finding a hotel room, he comes to his former home, where Beth now lives with their son and daughter, and does two things: has rage sex with Beth and then heads on to Gabe and Karen’s, drawn by Beth’s mention of a great dessert. It’s not only that, of course. He does seem to want to even the score in their friends’ eyes, but mostly, let’s face it, he’s hungry, and he wants tasty food.
Gabe and Karen are pretty thrown off by his attitude, and much as Gabe wants to be a good friend to Tom, he’s a devoted and dependable husband and father who cannot wrap his mind around Tom’s actions and thoughts. Like any steadfast family man, Gabe can’t understand how Tom can so flippantly move away from his wife and children — how he can leave them behind without a moment’s qualms.
Here the director Norman Jewison (Moonstruck, Jesus Christ Superstar) did a good job guiding Kinnear’s performance. Of course, it’s also his fresh, boyish face, but Kinnear manages to act the part of Tom without making him seem sleazy in the least. Even when he has sex with his broken-hearted wife or tells his best friend that his lover makes him think of sex all the time. This is clearly a man who not only has a midlife crisis but also hasn’t matured enough to stop and consider his behavior before acting, and yet with Kinnear in this role, there is an innocence to Tom’s character that makes it hard to blame Tom for wanting to be happy.
Because, as the film reveals later on, Tom hasn’t been happy for a long time. And yes, Beth had something to do with it.
There’s more to the story in this film, including a rosy sepia–toned sequence where the four friends, back when only Gabe and Karen were a couple, spend time together at a beach house twelve years previously, but I’ll let you discover it yourself.
It all hinges on how Tom’s actions impact Gabe and Karen as a couple. It’s always like this, isn’t it? If a marriage dissolves, then friends have to take sides while they also reevaluate what had been happening in that old found family of theirs and what it means for the ones who do stay together as a couple.
I’ll just add that all four actors are exceptional in this film, Quaid for a restrained act even when he’s trying to mobilize his middle-age energy to act angry to Tom, Kinnear for putting on the charms to show Tom’s best friend that he’s found something valuable, MacDowell for showing displeasure with Tom’s choice in a fluid way that runs the gamut from much subtlety to down-and-out rejection, and Collette for playing the variety of facets that her character possesses with a buoyancy that leaves the viewer enchanted.
Enjoy!
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Thank you for reading!
If you liked this piece, here is one other article you may enjoy:
‘Rooster’, a Campus Comedy with Much-Endearing Actors
And here are some of my customizable Zazzle designs for the holiday season:
https://happierhealthier.blog/tag/christmas
To a happier, healthier life,
Mira
