Garden Party, opening in limited release next week, is being touted as the arrival of a hot new talent in the person of writer/director Jason Freeland. In fact, though, Freeland's first film was an entire decade ago, a somewhat bewildering James Ellroy adaptation called Brown's Requiem. His new film, though, with its attractive young cast and allegedly verite look at contemporary Los Angeles, is getting way more attention than Brown's Requiem ever did, and if it's not technically his debut, it's at least poised to be his breakthrough. We had a chance to screen Garden Party recently; should you believe the hype?
Boiled down to the one-sentence description that no doubt got it through the vetting process, Garden Party is the story of a group of young people, all recently relocated to the vast construct of the American psyche that is Los Angeles, who try to get by faced with all the pitfalls and perils the wicked city is home to. Peopled with a game young cast, the movie gives us a bunch of characters who aren't quite established enough as archetypes to come across as trite right off the bat; there's the vaguely sinister real estate agent/drug dealer, the allegedly brilliant young musician who drifts through life intersecting with the other characters but never making a real emotional commitment to any of them, the renegade bohemian with a porn fetish, the sexually abused teen, and half a dozen other characters who seem like they just got off the late shift at the Quaalude factory. Needless to say, their stories all intersect in sometimes surprising, sometimes predictable ways; needless to say, a few of them experience what could be called a revelation if it didn't come across as so utterly trifling; and, needless to say, there's lots of fashionable sex, drugs, and pouting to make thing palatable to the drugged-out, pouty teenage couples who are presumably the movie's target audience. With all this stuff being needless to say, you might ask: why was it even necessary to make the film? The answer? That is a good question.
There are a few good reasons to see Garden Party. Freeland has a distinctive, if rather undeveloped, visual sensibility, and his pacing is very fine, keeping you involved in the story even when it spills over into the cliches he generates as a writer. And a number of the members of the largely anonymous cast are worth watching, particularly the lovely, polished Willa Holland in the lead role. However, these aspects are overwhelmed by its overall shapelessness and the fact that it seems kluged together from parts of other, usually better movies: the plot and structure capture the worst aspects of Rent but can't handle the best of Short Cuts. The teen cast and sexual panic aspects play like a lite version of Kids. The pseudo-verite is drawn from Cloverfield and the sense of communal destiny is like a mopier version of Magnolia. It draws its "depressed young white people unable to make significant emotional connections" vibe from the mumblecore movement, and its misunderstood-sensitive-genius characters from the mind of every teenager ever. Even the ad campaign makes it look like a moody remake of Swimfan. Freeland has the talent to make distinctive movies, but he seems to lack the focus to make ones that don't mostly remind us of a million things we've seen before.