Four attractive, twenty-something housemates pursue life and love beneath the smoggy skies of LA in this urban soap opera that--for better or worse--is true to its milieu.
Set in the aftermath of a New Year's Eve party gone sour, the film documents in flashback the events leading up to the failed revels. M.J. (Rae Dawn Chong), a high-powered investment banker, is materially wealthy but emotionally needy; as well as having an ongoing affair with Taylor (Brian
McNamara), the lawyer boyfriend of social worker Frankie (Elizabeth Berridge), she is engaged in a continuous, promiscuous search for Mr. Right. When she thinks she's found him, in the shape of a rich prospective client, he rapes her. Frankie, when not coping with Taylor's grasping fecklessness,
works in South Central Los Angeles, trying to lure artistic gang members away from graffiti and into painting city-funded building murals. Her most promising prospect is killed in a drive-by shooting, but she turns down a job offer in San Francisco to stay in the city and work with another
youngster.
Aspiring artist Amanda (Sandra Bullock) fends off crude advances from refined gallery owners while trying to get herself established, is being courted by wacky performance artist Alexander (Fisher Stevens), and is trying to heal a rift between her teenage brother and neglectful father. Banks
(Kris Kamm), a blonde, blue-eyed gay actor, attends countless auditions in which he competes with endless clones of himself for bit parts in movies, TV shows, and commercials. He eventually accepts an invitation to leave LA and join Chicago's Steppenwolf stage troupe after punching out M.J.'s
rapist, against whom she has decided not to press charges. The New Year's party becomes a farewell for Banks, but the festivities are upset by Frankie's witnessing of the drive-by shooting, and then by her discovery of the affair between Taylor and M.J. Frankie casts Taylor out of her life and
leaves the house to get away from M.J., while Amanda's relationship with Alexander heats up, implying that there will soon be a vacant house for rent in the Hollywood Hills.
PARTY is an uncommonly dispiriting film, a sour companion piece to Steve Martin's sunnier L.A. STORY. Photographed on a very tight four-week shooting schedule and for a relatively miniscule budget of $600,000, it's also a less ambitious--and less pretentious--variation on Lawrence Kasdan's GRAND
CANYON. The drive-by shooting notwithstanding, PARTY avoids the more widely reported urban ills of LA. Yet, the underlying view of director Matthew Irmas and writer Ann Wycoff is of a place in which superficially appealing, ambitious people screw (literally and figuratively), lie to, beat and
sometimes kill each other in an endless quest to make themselves richer, more powerful and more attractive.
All of the characters share a certain thinness and implausibility. It's never explained, for example, why the successful M.J. needs to share a house with other people. Meanwhile, Banks has no visible means of support beyond the acting jobs he usually doesn't get. He also, in contrast to his
housemates, has no visible sex life. Though Kamm performs well and avoids the usual gay cliches, his character functions mainly as the sympathetic gay-pal-to-the-gals that has become a mainstay in films from FRANKIE AND JOHNNY to SINGLE WHITE FEMALE.
The performances in PARTY are solid throughout and the script has stretches of strong writing to compensate for the occasional creak and groan of contrivance. Ironically, the occasional lapses into glossiness seem appropriate to an environment in which slickness is a measure of value, rather
than a flaw. (Profanity, adult situations, sexual situations, violence.) leave a comment
