PG | 1h 48min | Drama, Comedy | 1967
Stanley Kramer’s “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” is all of 108 minutes, but packed with truth and insight that echoes beyond its genre, its generation, and its geography.
Young Joanna or Joey (Katharine Houghton) tells her parents, Christina (Katharine Hepburn) and Matt (Spencer Tracy), of her plans to marry a doctor, John (Sidney Poitier), who’s distinguished enough to be a senior official in an international organization.
She’d met him while vacationing in Hawaii and, after a brief courtship, brings him home to her parents in San Francisco. She then invites his parents, Mary (Beah Richards) and Prentice Sr. (Roy E Glenn Sr.), to dinner and, when family friend Monsignor Mike (Cecil Kellaway) drops by, she invites him, too.
Domestic Thriller
Screenwriter William Rose and director Kramer execute this comedy-drama like it’s a thriller. It opens harmlessly enough, like a party-game full of surprises. But that tone changes when surprise turns to shock.Given how steeped in the prejudice of each of their cultures their otherwise fair-minded parents are, the couple’s announcement feels more like confronting than confiding. The loose cinematic rope that Kramer strings around his characters is meant to bring them closer and to gradually break the ice. Suddenly, it tightens like a noose.
Kramer’s camera hints at impending full-blown societal censure of this interracial marriage, even before his movie hits full stride. He reveals glimpses of startled eyes, gaping mouths, frowns, smirks: a cabbie staring at the couple in his rear-view mirror, Joey’s overprotective black housemaid Tillie wagging her finger at John, prying office-aide Hilary upbraiding Christina for daring to be nonplussed, not outraged.
Kramer cleverly uses spaces to allow characters to breathe, show mood swings, or manufacture dramatic tension. You see characters taking what private time and space they have, to think things through, weigh arguments, anticipate counterarguments, and craft how they’ll make their points gently (or forcefully) to someone else.
Right Point of View
Kramer uses POV shots to get the audience thinking with him and his character. Much of it’s for comic effect, such as when characters cope with the initial shock, half-grinning awkwardly at each other as if in stupor. Other shots are sober. Christina and Matt gaze from their hall out at Joey and John laughing joyfully in the courtyard, while wondering at the stakes were they to disrupt that joy by disapproving of the marriage.Kramer uses comedy to demonstrate simple, yet elusive, truths. Matt orders an ice-cream he thinks he likes because he liked it once. He’s mistakenly given another, frowns with displeasure at his first scoop, then brightens at his second. That’s Kramer saying we can’t trust our judgment too much. We change our minds. And that’s all right. He isn’t being flippant by likening people to ice cream. He’s spoofing human frailty and why we should be more accepting of others: we share that same frailty, that longing for acceptance.
Rose’s script bristles with wisdom. The monsignor says he’s seen interracial marriages that, counterintuitively, worked well; perhaps, he imagines, because they require more effort, understanding, and compassion than other marriages. And Katherine Hepburn delivers those memorable lines to indict racism as, “sometimes hateful, usually stupid, but always wrong.”
Funnily for a movie titled thus, there’s no full-fledged dinner scene. Rose and Kramer use the idea of dinner as a metaphor for family or a microcosm of society. We all share the same table, but fill different chairs, use different plates, and pick different dishes. What’s common is the table itself: we must all come to it to nourish ourselves and our food on the table comes from the same source.
A happy table, Kramer guesses, recognizes the common ground we share, while respecting, even celebrating or laughing about, our differences. Watch his film and you’ll see why his guess is right.
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