Unique Party a Never-Ending Celebration

Sally St. Clair (Vinessa Shaw) is a realtor who uses her talents for growing marijuana to maintain a cadre of A-list clients. She’s built her thriving practice on sex appeal, candor and guts, and while this has left her more then a bit disconnected from many of those around her it has also gained her an eye for discovering lost souls in need of direction and purpose.

Erik Scott Smith and Fiona Dourif in Roadside Attractions' Garden Party

Her latest discovery is Nathan (Alexander Cendese). He lives in one of Sally’s properties, taking care of her plants and doing odd jobs around the office. It’s a good gig, but also a lonely one, so when he meets the musically talented drifter Sammy (Erik Smith) Nathan decides to help the kid more out of his own need for companionship then any desire to see the singer-songwriter get back on his feet.

Also passing through each of their lives is April (Willa Holland), a beautiful teenager looking to get out a bad family situation. But when an erotic photographer introduces her to Nathan, dominoes start falling affecting all of their lives in ways none of them are prepared for, Sally – newly connected to a mysterious voyeur named Todd (Richard Gunn) – learning that even she isn’t above a little California chaos when you reside in an ominous playground called L.A.

Garden Party is as distinctly a Los Angeles motion picture as any I have ever seen. Few films speak to the almost unhinged weirdness of the city like writer/director Jason Freeland’s (Brown’s Requiem) sophomore feature. Adapted from a series of his own short stories, there is an almost unhinged devil-may-care surrealism to the proceedings bordering on the unclassifiable. The result is a movie impossible to pigeonhole and one even more difficult to describe, and to say there hasn’t been anything else quite like it this year wouldn’t be a lie.

None of which should be construed as my saying I loved it. While I think Freeland has constructed a good movie, he’s also made one that is extremely difficult to get a feel for. All of these weirdly disassociated vignettes may be oddly interesting but that doesn’t mean they always connect in any sort of visceral way. For a good twenty minutes or so I found myself more peculiarly curious as to what would be happening next than I was feeling any sort of emotional attachment to the proceedings, numerous moments and scenes coming perilously close to driving me so far up the wall I almost wanted to screen.

And yet, there is a bewildering rapture to be found in watching Garden Party from start to finish. Almost before I realized it, the filmmaker and his team had cast an intoxicating spell I didn’t want to turn away from. More, I honestly didn’t know what was going to happen next, and while I could reasonably surmise a few of the characters’ subsequent actions what was going to happen to all of them collectively was definitely a mystery.

Even better, walking out it still is. Freeland has populated his film with real people, and even if the world they’re trying to live in feels almost unnatural and dreamlike the truths all of them are searching for are so universal and human I couldn’t help but relate. I knew these guys, felt their pain and understood where they were coming from, so many of their dreams and longings as eerily familiar as my very own.  

By the time it was rolling towards its climax I almost didn’t want the movie to end. I’d become so caught up in all that was going on and the many stories twirling one around the other that I found I was eager to see them play out over a lifetime, not just the barely 90-minues this film lasts. For such an oddly enchanting and deeply unusual project like Garden Party, that’s maybe the strangest outcome of them all.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  2008 SIFF Blog by Sara Michelle Fetters
-  2008 Seattle International Film Festival Home Page
-  Garden Party Theatrical Trailer