The Anniversary Party: an Actor Movie with a Real Star

The Anniversary Party Directed by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming "No thank you," you say, and turn the page. Fair enough. Heaven knows The Anniversary Party is the kind of film that violently divides viewers; actor movies usually are, because actors tend to make movies about lost, crumbling or marginalized people at the ends of their ropes?people who make audiences want to cringe, either because the behavior is so raw or because the actor has miscalculated. Recent movies that some actors regard as the fulfillment of creative fantasies?movies by people like Paul Thomas Anderson and actor-directors Sean Penn, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth?were dismissed in some quarters as unfocused, indulgent and too eager to mistake degradation for truth (a view that is not without merit). But other actor-initiated films that were less raw and grandiose and generally well-reviewed?Steve Buscemi's Trees Lounge and Animal Factory, Tom Noonan's What Happened Was... and this year, Joe Mantegna's outstanding Lakeboat?got lost in the distribution shuffle anyway. Why? Partly because some of the same critics who whine and moan about American film's disinterest in reality and human emotion failed to go the extra mile in recommending them. Was it because the films like Trees Lounge and Animal Factory are small and plain, and critics, like regular viewers, like 'em big and shiny? 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.