‘The Party’
Directed by Sally Potter
Starring Patricia Clarkson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Timothy Spall
Rated R
Playing at Angelika Film Center, Landmark at 57 West
Any feature-length movie that runs 71 minutes, credits and all, stands at a disadvantage, no matter the level of talent involved or sharpness of the screenplay.
It’s perhaps unfair to criticize “The Party,” the new film from the great writer-director Sally Porter (“Orlando”), for its brevity, and yet that is its defining feature.
Potter establishes a one-act premise with plenty of satirical potential — a politician named Janet played by Kristin Scott Thomas holds a dinner party attended by characters played by a lot of great actors, at which rapid-fire black comic antics ensue — and rushes through it to a hasty and sudden end.
You simply wish there were more of this. It’s not something that comes around every day. Shot in evocative black and white, “The Party” resurrects a classic screwball form.
Potter fills it with sharp, caustic dialogue and sequences that manage to be both heightened and truthful, evoking buried, long-standing wounds as the dinner party goes rapidly haywire and the intelligentsia depicted here is exposed as a fraud.
The ensemble also features Timothy Spall, Emily Mortimer, Bruno Ganz, Cillian Murphy, Patricia Clarkson and Cherry Jones. It’s fast and funny, while allowing many of the actors to strike notes we don’t often associate with them.
Spall is a burned-out shell of a man as Janet’s husband, Bill, playing his hollow-eyed suffering to grand comic effect. Ganz, perhaps best known for starring as Adolf Hitler in “Downfall,” is a goofy spiritualist named Gottfried. Murphy’s Tom is a frenzied, sweating, drug-snorting wreck.
It’s fun to watch for the brief time we are allowed to, but it doesn’t amount to anything substantial or lasting because of the movie’s inexplicable hurry to end things and shuffle off the stage.
