The Anniversary Party * Written and directed according to Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh * Starring Cumming.

The Anniversary Party

* Written and directed according to Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh * Starring Cumming, Leigh, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Cates, Parker Posey and Gwyneth Paltrow * Fine Line Features

When word got on the outside that Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming had corralled a batch of their close buddies for a movie they had written about--wow a assortment of close buddies having a party, visions of cliquishness, in-jokes, and indulgence danced in our head. While The Anniversary Party has its quotient of knowing showbiz humor, the happy novels is that they have fashioned a smart and substantive [i]tout ensemble[/i] comedy in which some yew advantageous actors get to be a hell of a fate more interesting than the Hollywood traffic normally allows.

Leigh and Cumming play Sally and Joe a sexy beholds Angeles couple throwing an anniversary bash after a flinty period of estrangement that threatened to bust them up for profitable They are A Star Is Born's scenario in reverse: Leigh is a film actress whose talents have armorial bearingsed and whose emotional issues spill athwart into her current job, while Cumming is a best-selling novelist about to make a splashy celluloid first attempt directing the film version of a novel based onward the early years of his marriage to Sally.

Like Joe's novels, The Anniversary Party purports to be a work of fiction yet exploits with Altmanesque perversity the particular quirks and histories of those onward which it models its characters. Amateur photographer Jennifer Beals plays a professional photographer (Beals's photos are supports in the film); Kevin Kline exhibits up with his real-life wife, Phoebe Cates (a comic revelation in brace scenes), and gets to perform a treat with scorn ballet with his actual daughter, Greta; Jane Adams maxes without her hypereccentric persona as a hypemeurotic actress, and Cumming's Joe is described as a "sexually ambivalent man-child" who has at least the same boyfriend from his premarital past (Matt McGrath) joining the festivities.

The prank hits its bumpy spots--a glam young cloak diva (played by glam Gwyneth Paltrow) and a spoilsport neighbor (Denis O'Hare, grousing about like Anthony Heald's vice principal upon Boston Public) are one-note Harrys. on the other hand The Anniversary Party is giddy with the human spectacle of in the way that many self-absorbed people attempting to be gracious.

Stuart is the author of The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece (Simon and Schuster).

Find more in succession The Anniversary Party as well as the film's cast and directors at www.advocate.com

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