The Anniversary Party: an Actor Movie with a Real Star

The
Anniversary Party
Directed
by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming

No
matter; The Anniversary Party, with its cast full of famous and semifamous
names, and its substantial distribution from Fine Line, might prove to be the
ultimate test of whether actor movies can connect with mass audiences. It won’t
be easy. The rarefied cineastes at the Cannes Film Festival practically laughed
it off the screen, and for every reviewer I’ve talked to who loved it, another
despised it with a passion. After a Manhattan screening last week, an influential
New York critic, surrounded by three other critics who liked the film a lot, dismissed
it as a standard-issue Actors-Emote-During-a-Party film; said it stole too much
from Sellers’ picture and insisted it was badly directed because it favored
closeups. My response–closeups are the best way to capture the human face,
and on top of that, the movie was shot on video, which tends to look like crap
unless the camera is extremely close–was admittedly a rather defensive one.
But movies are like friends. You make deep connections with them and want to defend
them against the world because when you defend a movie you love, you’re defending
a part of yourself.

Leigh
and Cumming play Sally and Joe Therrian, who have been married for six years and
have recently gotten back together after a separation. The film begins at the
matrimonial equivalent of ground zero: in bed. It’s early in the morning
on the day of their anniversary party; Joe is asleep and Sally is looking at him.
They fool around a little, and Joe kisses her belly. It’s a significant gesture
that foreshadows the root of the tension between them: despite fertility problems,
they are determined to have children. But do they want kids because they’re
ready to become parents, or because they hope a child will heal the wounds that
still divide them?

It’s
an intriguing opening that announces the film’s maturity. Sally and Joe want
kids, and many of the guests at their party already have them. Denis O’Hare
and Mina Badie play a couple–a novelist and his wife–who live next door
to the Therrians and have apparently been fighting a running battle over the Therrians’
barking dog. Reilly and Adams are a director-actress couple who just had a child,
and were profoundly affected by it. He’s depressed to realize that his recent
movie isn’t very good; she’s a neurotic pill-popper who, deep down,
is scared of being a mother and deeply resents her own kid.

Kline
and Cates, married parents in real life, play roles that explore similar tensions.
The parts are rather bravely modeled on their own public personas; he’s an
aging A-list leading man whose fondness for quoting Shakespeare makes him a human
running gag; she’s a talented younger actress who more or less retired from
the business to be a mom, and views her own sacrifice with a mix of pride and
regret. Jennifer Beals is Gina Taylor, a gorgeous single photographer who’s
Joe’s best friend and his closest confidant during his separation from Sally;
she seems to understand Joe in a profound way that eludes Sally, and her quietly
intimate conversations with Joe drive the wife absolutely batty, though she wouldn’t
dare admit it for fear of seeming jealous. Sally’s longtime best friend,
Levi Panes (Michael Panes), is as much of a soulmate to her as Joe is to Gina,
but this relationship lacks the dangerous element of flirtation. He’s just
a funny, supportive guy who plays the violin and does a mean Peter Sellers impression.
Still, his longtime closeness to Sally means he can push her toward truths she
wouldn’t entertain from anyone else.

The
group is rounded out by numerous minor characters, including John Benjamin Hickey
(who costarred with Cumming and Leigh on Broadway in Cabaret) and Parker
Posey as the Therrians’ business managers. She’s an outwardly uptight
oddball who flowers into weirdness as the party progresses, he’s a wisecracking
hardcase who’s wound so tight that a simple game of charades sends him over
the edge.

The
fly in the ointment is Skye Davidson (Gwyneth Paltrow), an attractive and acclaimed
young actress Joe wants to cast as the lead in his directorial debut. The problem:
Joe’s film is based on a very autobiographical novel whose lead female character
was modeled on Sally as a younger woman. The obvious thing to do would be to cast
Sally in the role; but Sally’s too old for the part and has a reputation
for being a divisive, dangerous performer with no box office appeal (another autobiographical
touch). Sally is deeply hurt by Joe’s Machiavellian but understandable casting
decision, and bewildered that he would invite this pretty young thing to their
anniversary party for a first-time meeting. The look on the other guests’
faces as they weigh Joe’s maneuver (some are outraged, some are understanding,
but almost no one complains to Joe) returns the story to its central theme: the
conflict between creative ambition and domestic politics. Ambition wins.

Unlike
some actor movies set in Hollywood, The Anniversary Party isn’t a
snotty, insular justification for bad behavior. It acknowledges that while creative
people are emotional (and geographical) nomads, they long for stability and a
home base just like anybody else. But their business encourages, perhaps even
demands, a certain freedom, a lack of accountability, a willingness to liberate
(or debase) oneself. This impulse puts them at odds with the rest of so-called
"polite" civilization. Unlike, say, P.T. Anderson’s sex, booze
and cocaine-driven Boogie Nights and Magnolia, The Anniversary
Party doesn’t make the audience feel like bewildered guests at some appallingly
out-of-control actors’ retreat–a place where the physical costs of hedonism
are rationalized as the by-product of feeling too much. Leigh and Cumming’s
narrative illustrates both the reason artists do drugs (they’re fun; they’re
communal; they free the subconscious) and the reason they stop doing them (they
are the enemy of domesticity and safety).

Sally
and Joe are Hollywood people through and through, and they inhabit one of the
great L.A. movies in recent years. The Therrians and their party guests make a
big show of prizing authenticity, craft and personal privacy. Yet they can’t
help behaving like faux-sincere, faux-confessional Hollywood pod people. They
do meditative stretching exercises with a personal yoga coach and employ two Hispanic
maids they cluelessly insist are adjunct family members. (Meeting one of the maids,
Skye speaks Spanish to her–an outwardly liberal, democratic gesture that’s
actually proof of her vanity; give Paltrow points for parodying her own movie
princess image.) The Therrians agree this anniversary party is an important, perhaps
borderline sacred event, yet they treat it like just another industry party, inviting
people they hope to win over (a popular actress, the touchy neighbors) and people
they don’t need to win over but feel obligated to reassure (the business
manager and his wife).

When
the casual partygoers go home and only the diehards remain, the drugs come out
(it’s ecstasy, a gift from Skye). The use of drugs as a catalyst for revelation
and bad behavior is an actor movie cliche, but The Anniversary Party proves
its intelligence by letting each guest greet the chance to partake with a specific,
personal reaction. Some of the guests pop the tabs like Tic-Tacs. (They’re
led by Joe, an ambisexual hedonist who only pretends to be domesticated.) Others
do it out of nostalgia, ritual or social obligation. The novelist next door, a
recovering alcoholic, refuses to join the group and is appalled when his starstruck
wife doesn’t stand by him; she gets down and dirty with the beautiful people,
and he loiters in the kitchen with the maids.

Leigh
and Cumming film the proceedings with a predictably actorish attention to facial
expression, body language and (excuse the phrase) the pregnant pause. There are
plenty of missteps, a couple of outright blunders and at least one sequence that
seems to go on for several self-congratulatory weeks. (The guests take turns praising
Sally and Joe for staying together; the subtext, alas, is a bunch of actors congratulating
two colleagues on making an actor movie.)

But
the film’s adult intelligence shines throughout, illuminating confrontations
and confessions that might otherwise seem a tad murky. Even when The Anniversary
Party wanders off the narrative trail, it betrays a sense of purpose, a moral
vision. It knows what it’s about and where it’s going, and it tells
its story in sensible, well-chosen images: mostly medium shots and closeups, with
a few long shots of the Therrians’ metaphorically appropriate glass house.
And the script’s construction has a welcome theatrical sense of metaphor.
The film’s first act ends with a game of charades, and it’s followed
up with a shot of a food tray accessorized with a selection of knives. Translation:
the charade is over and the knives come out.

At
the center of the storm is Leigh, a performer whose up-and-down, wildly controversial
career amounts to an actor movie all its own. I have a love-hate relationship
with Leigh’s career: much of her work has struck me as ungainly–a volatile
mix of emotionally transparent naturalism and pathetically obvious actorly vanity
(sluts, hookers, addicts). After Georgia, for which the New York Film Critics
Circle gave her a Best Actress prize, I pretty much wrote her off as the most
abrasive sort of great actor: the kind who mistakes brazenness for bravery, horror
for truth and grottiness for reality; a female Gary Oldman.

Surprise,
surprise. The Anniversary Party amounts to a summation of her still-young
career–a film that tells us quite a bit about where she’s being coming
from all these years. And her performance as Sally is the first thing she’s
done in a long time that left me mute with admiration. She’s quieter, more
reactive, more intuitive than she’s been for quite a while. As photographed
by the great John Bailey–who gives the digital video images a velvety, faintly
metallic beauty–she has a ghostly radiance, a wary intelligence, an unlovability
that would serve as a badge of honor were it not for the fact that Sally wishes
she were more lovable. Leigh’s performance reminded me of Mia Farrow in Hannah
and her Sisters and Liv Ullman in Bergman’s 60s movies. Her scenes with
Cumming (who’s good and fun, if a bit too smirky) are deceptive; at first,
he seems to have the showier role. But the movie actually revolves around Sally–her
psychic injuries, her self-deceptions, her buried rage over the fact that Joe
has flowered under her gaze and she’s shrunk in his shadow. Perhaps it’s
no accident that Leigh does the best work of her life in a rather constrained
set of circumstances. As in Washington Square and Dolores Claiborne–two
not-great films with great Leigh performances–The Anniversary Party
forces her to hide things from the audience and her character; her subtlety and
reticence force you to lean in and pay attention, to feel rather than think, and
to prize her eyes and face. There is a word for an actor who understand the value
of secrets: a star.