Co-written and co-directed and co-starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming, The Anniversary Party might seem to those who haven’t seen it like a self-indulgent actorly exercise in which the filmmakers also cast their friends to participate in the mutual back-patting and showing off. Far from that however, the creators have taken as brave a stance as you’re likely to see in a film, whereby they have portrayed characters that come off at times as authentically unattractive as you’re likely to see.

What compounds the almost shocking degree of honesty to which they’ve portrayed their characters’ foibles, is how closely the characters in many instances seem to mirror and comment on the actors’ real lives. It’s relatively easy on one’s self-image to portray a cartoonishly heinous character a la Freddy Krueger or some psychopathic serial rapist/murderer/torturer—after all the actor is safe from being mistaken for that character in the public’s mind, but to act the role of someone with more grounded and real life flaws tempered with sympathetic attributes and to do it honestly is a more daring accomplishment. The entire cast of The Anniversary Party can be commended for holding up as honest a mirror as they have to themselves and their roles. Of course, there is a self-serving aspect to the undertaking—they do after all get to show off their acting chops with truly meaty characters to bite into, but they wouldn’t be able to exploit this asset without also delving into a darker and unpleasant underbelly to draw from.

The story occurs over the course of a single evening, with Leigh and Cumming playing Sally and Joe Therrian, a married couple throwing a party to celebrate their sixth anniversary. On a more personal level to them the party also commemorates their decision to start a family after having spent a year in separation. She is also an actress currently working on a movie and facing a downwardly spiraling career. He is a novelist whose novel based somewhat on their marriage is being produced as a movie with him as its director.

Sally, no longer the youngish twenty-something starlet she once was, has reached that ironic point in her career when she is too old to be cast as her own self. That part has been awarded to young starlet Skye Davidson, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Sally guards her pain and humiliation over this as best she could publicly, although her dismay is never wanting for expressing in private to Joe. Paltrow and Leigh do so well in playing their scenes together without the obviousness of teeth bared beneath false smiles. You sincerely believe in Skye’s professing her admiration for Sally’s work. The actresses never betray their integrity, and we are thusly kept off-balance, trained to expect the ingenue-reveals-her-deviousness scene that we’ve seen in so many All About Eve knock-offs over the years. Happily, this doesn’t occur.

John C. Reilly plays Mac, their friend and the director of the film Sally is currently in along with Cal Gold, played by Kevin Kline. Reilly has been so terrific in so many films by now (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, The Perfect Storm, etc.) that he deserves to be more of a household name by now. Distraught over how poorly his film is shaping up (due partly to Sally’s poor performance in it), he has a bravura mini-breakdown scene later in the film after a near-disastrous swimming pool incident. In trying to gain his composure and then collapsing when in private, he renders a refreshingly genuine picture of a man in emotional trouble but not too much trouble. Playing Mac’s wife Clair, is Jane Adams, so good in the film Happiness, and here playing an actress who has just had a baby. Her seeming ambivalence over what one would think is a joy, foreshadows what we learn later about Sally, and illustrates the less than proud theme of the selfishness of many in the acting profession.

Kline appears with his wife in real life Phoebe Cates, also playing his onscreen wife here, Sophia Gold. Suggestive of their real lives, Ms. Cates’ Sophia is an actress who has put her own career on hold to raise their children, while Cal has continued his career to acclaim. Kline is terrific in a pool side scene with Cumming when fishing for a part in Joe’s film which is still undergoing some casting. Reminded that he is aging beyond the confines of the young roles he used to play, Kline isn’t so pathetic as it might sound—prideful himself as is his character Cal, both engage the scene with a lighter, more humorous touch that avoids bathos.

As Sally’s best friend, Sophia feels like one of the most grounded characters in the film (is it the children?) and the one more prone to offering Sally snatches of sane advice. Daringly, she even questions Joe’s sexuality in one scene—it’s an almost off the cuff remark, feeling possibly ad-libbed although I doubt that. But it does reflect the honest nature of the film in view of Cumming’s own real life professed homosexuality, and the total degree to which the cast is allowed to draw on not only themselves but each other’s lives.

Parker Posey (Screen Actor’s Guild statutes require that a film cannot be deemed an indie without Parker Posey in the cast) appears with John Benjamin Hickey as Judy and Jerry Adams, the Therrians’ business managers. They are a hoot, and Hickey in particular is ferociously competitive in a game of charades. It might have been a little over the top, but then again I’ve been in charades games where the intensity was perhaps equally palpable.

Mina Badie and Denis O’Hare play the Therrian’s next door neighbors Monica and Ryan Rose, who have been invited to the party only as a way of trying to avoid a lawsuit over a dog barking complaint. Ryan is the more openly abrasive and unforgiving toward the Therrians, although when pressed, Monica will passively and as gently as possible also support their joint position that the Therrian’s dog has been overly vocal. O’Hare also begrudges the fact that Joe’s novel has skyrocketed while his own published novels haven’t even been heard of as the aforementioned charades game humorously attests to.
Nevertheless, as good an actor as he is, I felt his dourness was perhaps a bit much, and I would have liked to see a shade more levity somewhere in his scenes, particularly in one scene by the swimming pool while his wife spoke lovingly and supportively by his side.

I’m not entirely convinced the Roses would really have been invited to the party in the first place, and even further dubious to me seems their taking up the invitation, especially in view of Ryan’s disgruntlement over the success of his rival author/neighbor and the potential for humiliation therein. Perhaps though, their presence is a signpost of the falseness on other levels of the party’s endeavor.

Michael Panes plays Sally’s best friend, Levi Panes, and Jennifer Beals plays the corresponding best friend to Joe, Gina Taylor, a photographer. I like that there are characters with the same last name as one of the performers (Adams), but here in Panes case, that play with identity is taken even a step further. His resemblance to Peter Sellers is not ignored by either the filmmakers (his appearance recalls Sellers in another Hollywood party film from 1968, The Party), nor by the characters themselves who tell him several times he looks like Mr. Sellers. The blurring of actors and their roles is efficiently underscored thus as an overall comment about the characters.

As Mr. Cumming explains, when he and Ms. Leigh wrote their screenplay, they had actors in mind for each of the parts they wrote, and that being the case, they wrote the roles with those actors in mind, taking into account their speech cadences, vocabularies, and personal style. The process paid off remarkably well, and thankfully, their actor-friends came through and participated in this project shot over 19 days on a digital video format.

One very promising aspect of the film is the hope it offers of the potential for shooting on video when in the hands of an outstanding cinematographer such as John Bailey. If after seeing a film like Startup.com you might find yourself ready to give up on the format altogether, due to the utterly raw look. But seeing this film and actually viewing some scenes that appear as absolutely filmic as you’ve ever seen video appear, you’re likely to feel the future of shooting on video may not be all that dim. Bailey used top of the line cameras for the assignment and achieved a remarkable clarity and softness (not soft-focus but soft as opposed to a hard-edged video look). Now don’t get me wrong, at the same time I praise it, after short close inspection it is unmistakably video. But the point is that just because video may allow for a speedier, easier shooting schedule, the need for knowledgeably artistic cinematographers has most definitely not been eliminated. Perhaps even moreso to compensate for the less aesthetically pleasing look of video, excellence in cinematography is called for. Certainly here, Mr. Bailey delivered.

Perhaps equally important was the decision to use two or even three cameras at a time. The improvisational style of the film really requires that more than just one camera be employed to capture the reactions that ordinarily would have been off camera and lost for eternity if the scene didn’t play out the same way on retakes due to its spontaneous style (yet still working within a structured script).

The onscreen/offscreen relationship trait of this production even carries over to the hands-on making of the movie, as Director of Photography John Bailey’s real life wife Carol Littleton edited the movie. Ms. Littleton is one of the very best editors in the world, her impossibly impressive credits including: Body Heat, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Big Chill, Places in the Heart, Silverado, The Accidental Tourist, Grand Canyon, Tuesdays With Morrie, and many other films. This film has been their ninth collaboration, and the family atmosphere of spouses and friends undoubtedly helped capture as Ms. Leigh put it, “the feeling of people who hang out together on a regular basis and the little ins and outs of friendship.”

The score by Michael Penn is wonderfully evocative at times, particularly the tune called “Nothing Like Us” which occurs more than once in the film. It has a somewhat operatic-sounding vocal melody performance that captures the largeness of the emotions in a sad bittersweet minor key, but functions perfectly as background music, never overshadowing the players.

The film’s overall message of the complexity of human relationships and the difficulty in maintaining even a positive loving relationship is quite a downer at times. Particularly heart-wrenching is a climatic confrontation between the two leads on a hillside as they look for their dog. But it’s a sobering theme, and one perhaps much more responsible then the false fairy tale-like one spoon fed by so many Hollywood movies that claim that simply loving someone is enough to get by. The complexity of the human dynamics involved sometimes render even loving relationships untenable.

BILLTK’s TRIVIA TIDBIT—The house the movie filmed in was one designed by the renowned mid-twentieth century Los Angeles architect Richard Neutra, who pioneered the International Style, emphasizing open design, indoor/outdoor living, and simplicity. The house was chosen for its very metaphorical pertinence to the characters: a glass house that exposed all as they bare their souls.


Recommended: Yes