Critic Reviews

The film is mostly a dance between Dinklage (also an executive producer here) and Dornan, who rises to the occasion and gives the best performance of his career as a man struggling to hang on to his sobriety even as he’s dragged through a hell of Los Angeles.

Dinklage excels in a very difficult role to pull off while Dornan keeps pace as his reluctant Boswell. Their love story, so to speak, is both an entertaining romp and a cautionary tale about a rocket ride to fame and the abundant excesses and afflictions that often are part and parcel.

The Danny plot is fine--nothing special really, although Dornan is excellent and manages to bring a good sense of transformation to an underwritten character. ... But Dinklage, like Dornan, manages to convey a fully dimensional person despite the skipping of narrative steps.

Dinklage catches the character’s anger, self-pity, and, most importantly, his exuberant recklessness. ... My Dinner with Hervé cannot make a straight-faced claim that Villechaize was an important actor or significant cultural figure, so its own significance depends on the star’s charisma, which lends the proceedings a simple poignance.

As Danny, Dornan makes a fine and necessarily sweaty foil for Dinklage, though the paralleling of his own ruined work and home life to Villechaize’s never quite works. ... It’s a searing and vulnerable turn from Dinklage.

More of a snack than a meal. But to the extent Villechaize wanted to leave his interviewer with a story worth telling, he did, just as Dinklage has put the movie on a higher plane -- getting beyond the catchphrase to reveal the wounded man underneath.

It doesn’t do enough to center [Hervé Villechaize's] story, focusing instead on how the star changed a journalist’s life. But it will begin to make you see Villechaize in a new light, not least because of Peter Dinklage’s performance. Dinklage inhabits the late actor’s unique diction and the ballistic energy he brought to his performances and, later, to annihilating himself. It’s a turn that’s sensitively calibrated despite its mania.

Dinklage turns in a fine performance, but his passion project is otherwise a standard-issue biopic.

The movie heightens the push-pull between the two men, each in his own way desperate. But it also formularizes the story into standard biopic territory and, like most all-nighters, it grows hazy and repetitive in the middle.

My Dinner With Hervé exists because two people shared a passion for the story they either lived through (Gervasi) or were inspired by (Dinklage). Unfortunately, so little of whatever sparked their persistent interest makes it to the screen. What’s left are two dudes with varying degrees of moral disrepair shouting at each other across the Hollywood Hills. That’s not enough to hold up an entire feature, or even a good dinner conversation.