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The thick porcelain cups filled with the kind of graveyard-shift coffee that wakes your tongue with its sharp acid.

The plates of fries smothered with gravy.

The booths with their linoleum tabletops and bench seats (usually with a small tear patched with tape).

The musical ka-ching of the cash registers.

The overlapping conversations full of cocky male bravado.

Welcome to the world of Barry Levinson’s 1982 masterpiece Diner. By the time he wrote and directed this story of young males in search of mates and meaning, Levinson had already been working in Hollywood for several years, starting as a comedy writer for programs like The Carol Burnett Show, then moving on to feature films, which include the excellent …And Justice For All and Inside Moves (both written with the actress Valerie Curtin, then his wife). All the time, he was working on a screenplay which was much closer to his heart, a story about male bonding and greasy spoons. It was a gentle plot—nothing spectacular happened, nothing blew up—but it was written with such heartfelt sympathy for the characters that if it wasn’t autobiographical, then it was darned close.

Fortunately, the planets aligned and Levinson not only sold the script to MGM, but he took the director’s chair for the first time. The result is near perfection.

Diner is the first installment in what is so far Levinson’s Baltimore quartet (the other three movies are Tin Men, the elegiac Avalon and 1999’s Liberty Heights). Levinson was born and raised in the Maryland city and his love for its working-class streets shines through in every frame of this and the other films.

Set in 1959, Diner follows a group of six college-age friends over the course of a week—from Christmas to New Years—as they gather together for one guy's wedding—nuptials which will only take place if the bride-to-be successfully passes a rigorous 140-question test on the Baltimore Colts, administered by the football-fanatic (and commitment-phobe) Eddie (Steve Guttenberg).

Each night, in the wee hours between the late show at the bijou and the break of dawn, Eddie gathers at Fells Point Diner with his buddies—all of whom go by a single name, which sounds cool and macho:
Shrevie (Daniel Stern): the only married guy in the bunch, he’s torn between his joyless marriage to Beth (Ellen Barkin) and the stimulating guy-talk at the diner.
Fenwick (Kevin Bacon): the self-destructive alcoholic who’s smarter than his baby-face looks let on.
Billy (Timothy Daly): home from college on Christmas break, he’s the most level-headed one and the guy with the biggest conscience (in other words, he’s the straight man).
Modell (Paul Reiser): the moocher (“Are you gonna finish that?”) and wise-crack (in other words, he’s the comic relief).
Boogie (Mickey Rourke): a sexual stud and guru to the others, he’s working as a hairdresser because it’s a great way to pick up women—even though it’s not enough to help pay off his loan shark.

Nearly half of the film takes place in the group’s favorite booth by the window. It’s a small diner, which looks like a converted Airstream trailer, and it’s a familiar world to anyone who has spent late nights slurping down battery-acid coffee and waving away cigarette smoke. Levinson recreates the diner with meticulous detail (for instance, there’s one shot of upended ketchup bottles being refilled that serves no other purpose than to pluck a sensory nerve in those of us familiar with the sight). Levinson creates a genuine atmosphere throughout the whole picture—from the late-model cars the guys drive to the rock-and-roll hits that blare from the radio. This is almost like watching a filmed memory.

There’s not much of a plot to speak of—unless you count Eddie’s approaching wedding and his increasing jitters. Loose in structure, Diner is a true slice of hometown life, as fresh and steaming as a just-baked pie.

What Diner does have, however, is conversation and plenty of it. Levinson has penned some incredibly sharp dialogue here. The guys sit around and discuss things like “Who’s the better singer to play while making out, Johnny Mathis or Frank Sinatra?” While downing endless cups of coffee and roast beef sandwiches, the guys chat about Mathis, chicks, Sinatra, chicks, the Colts, chicks and, uh, chicks.

Yes, it’s unapologetically chauvinistic and fiercely male in tone, but the talk is so breezy and improvisational that it’s also so fiercely authentic. I can’t help but admire it for its unapologetic celebration of all things male (be they ever so stupid and brash).

I saw Diner in the theater when it first came out. That was 1982, one year before I met the wonderful woman who would later become my wife. At the time, I was probably closest in spirit to the character Eddie—a baffled virgin who just couldn’t figure out how to get closer than arm’s length to that other race: women. I was struck by, and identified with, the dead-on dialogue. Plus, I thought it was pretty cool when Mickey Rourke poured sugar directly into his mouth then chased it with a gulp of Coke.

Watching it again recently for the first time in nearly two decades, I was still struck by how fresh the script sounded.

Not so my wife, who sat patiently through the chauvinism and sexual pranks, God bless her. Midway through, she groaned, “Man, this is a guy flick if I ever saw one.”

She’s probably right. The talk is locker-room and most of the men view women as objects. Eddie’s upcoming marriage is referred to as “the Thing” and we never actually see the bride, Elise; we just hear her voice as she’s taking the do-or-die Colts football quiz. It’s easy to see how this movie’s view of women would make females in the audience want to throw popcorn at the screen.

But I think Levinson was simultaneously celebrating male camaraderie while pointing out how embarrassingly stupid men could really be, especially when trying to fumble through their feelings for the opposite sex. Chicks leave these guys scratching their skulls—even the relatively stable Billy, who just got a girl pregnant and faces a life of commitment which probably wouldn’t turn out any better than Shrevie’s lackluster marriage. Women aren’t the enemy, but they are a race of riddles. As one character says, “Do you ever get the feeling that there's something going on that we don't know about?”

As that rare kind of guy who likes so-called chick flicks (I’m absolutely passionate about those Jane Austen films of the mid ’90s), I still find a lot of appeal in the testosterone-heavy Diner (the same goes for the similar Swingers, made fourteen years later).

There’s so much to love about this movie—from Reiser’s witty riffs on “nuance” versus “gesture,” to Bacon’s drunk destruction of the city’s Nativity scene, to Stern’s insistence that his 45s be filed alphabetically according to year and category, to the unforgettable scene involving a macho wager, a date with a blonde named Carol Heathrow and a box of popcorn. Those are the kind of classic scenes that have stuck with me for nearly twenty years. My wife may not get it, but this is the kind of male anthem (a “him hymn,” if you will) that I can sing along with.

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originally posted: 06/30/01 11:11:11
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