Sally Potter directed, and Kristin Scott Thomas and six other notable actors star in The Party about a small gathering at the home of a woman who just won a big political victory in the United Kingdom and is celebrating at home with her husband and their friends. The seventy-one minute movie feels longer and more like a play as each character makes the evening about them with increasingly dramatic announcements until everyone is in a dramatic frenzy and emotional upheaval.
If I am alone, people love to talk to me at the movie theater and process what they just saw. When I saw A Fantastic Woman, I also purchased a ticket to see The Party immediately afterwards. Another patron, a German professor in gender studies on her way to Radcliffe for a seminar after the movies, had the same itinerary, and we discussed the earlier film at length before watching Potter’s latest film. So ordinarily I would perhaps excuse my verdict of The Party as dreckitude as evidence that I am a philistine, but she wholeheartedly agreed with me that this movie is not worth your money or time.
I love all the actors in The Party. I loved Potter’s most notable film, Orlando. The Party feels like an amateur college playwright’s first stab at a drama with everything dialed up to a ten and nowhere to go but hysterics. Acting big works on the stage, but on film, it just seems excessive. The movie purports to tackle such important issues as gender roles, battle of the sexes, the intellectual versus the physical, ideals versus practical, duty versus passion, but it is just a tiresome, contrived mess. By the end, the only person that I would voluntarily hang out with from this movie was Patricia Clarkson’s character, and her boyfriend (there needs to be another name besides the pretentious term lover for people who are in a relationship but are above a certain age) does not have any damn sense to pick up the phone and call 999. The fact that the movie was filmed in black and white should have given me a clue that it was more pretentious and stylized than I imagined.
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Timothy Spall was giving more senility than shock, and I’m sorry, but I don’t see him pulling in any chick other than whomever he started out with in that state. For once, I want a movie in which when a spouse announces to the other that he or she is having an affair, the other one goes, “Me too!” They celebrate, split up and live their lives instead of acting outraged at a betrayal that they really don’t care about if the other has already stepped out. They don’t get back together or rediscover their love for each other. I never bought that the wife would be that angry since her career was great, and she was having her own affair. Once he let her off the duty hook, it would have been more interesting to see her let loose and be relieved. You can still get the same denouement if written with a little more restraint and gradations in revelation.
I love Cherry Jones on Transparent, but her relationship with Emily Mortimer seemed sexless here. If your wife is more than twice your age, you don’t get to be horrified about who she slept with before she met you. Also it should not take that long to take something burning from out of an oven. You are probably the worst chef in the world. I’m relieved that the two youngest people in the movie did not end up together otherwise I would have hurled something at the screen, especially since I am so tired of the trope of the lesbian who suddenly becomes heterosexual given the right circumstances, but Mortimer did have more chemistry with Cillian Murphy than Jones. Also you’re pregnant for a second, and someone just announced that he is dying. You can take a backseat for the night. There are months when you can take center stage, Mrs. Preggers. She was so aggrieved and took everything so personally that I silently wept for her unborn children’s future guilt trips.
I was kind of digging Bruno’s Ganz’s character until the negative female energy comment. Murphy is hopped up on drugs and bringing a gun to a party, you’re in denial that your girlfriend hates you and is dumping you, and stranger dude just announced that he is dying in the middle of a celebration of life and achievement for three of four chicks in the house. Y’all are bringing down the mood. It felt left field and like Potter’s contrived way to delineate everything into diametrically opposed polemics: straight/gay, male/female, academic/professional, spiritual/atheist, science/miracles, etc. Eyeroll.
Especially in contrast with A Fantastic Woman, The Party revealed nothing authentic about the human experience or honest about human emotions. It is too little by being too much. I can surmise that Potter was trying to show that even at our highest point, there is something more primal and chaotic at the core of ourselves, but I don’t care. You’re not unique to have a midlife crisis, and we’re all going to die. Keep it pushing! Potter, you owe Ridley Scott some money for your come lately existential crisis. He has been freaking out for much longer than you. Skip it!