The Anniversary Party is a true rarity: a film that fails on every conceivable level. What comes as a surprise is that it’s conceived by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming, two of the more interesting actors on the fringes of Hollywood. The Anniversary Party unfortunately proves that these actors are infinitely more interesting when they’re spouting somebody else’s dialogue. Their debut directorial effort shows them up to be petty, self obsessed, pretentious and wholly unpleasant – just like the Hollywood image that they’d long been an antidote to. This film isn’t just crushingly bad, it’s also disappointingly revealing of its two main players.
After a yearlong separation, Hollywood players Sally (Leigh) and Joe (Cumming) get back together, and then invite some of their closest friends around to celebrate their sixth wedding anniversary. For the rest of the film they play charades, drop ecstasy, 'discover themselves" and basically act like dickheads.
Allegedly inspired by the European Dogma movement (characterised in raw, straight-from-the-gut films like The Idiots and Festen), Leigh and Cumming shot their film on high-definition video on a tight budget and a short schedule. Apart from these surface similarities, however, the filmmakers have basically made a bitch of the Dogma movement, stripping it of its arresting primal force and tarting it up like a cheap punk. They bend it to their own ends, and tell a story of brain deadening self-indulgence – this is a character study where the characters are the type of people that you wouldn’t cross the street to piss on if they were burning to death, let alone want to watch in a movie. It’s this very failure to provide a story and set of characters who are neither fascinatingly nasty or in some way connected to the real world that proves that Leigh and Cumming have no idea about telling a story or making a film. The fact that they thought anyone else would care about their soulless, self absorbed existence shows a total lack of self awareness and a frightening hubris. Appalling.
Filmink .5/5
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