The Anniversary Party is a fascinating cinematic idea written, directed and starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cummings. In a mixture of fiction and reality similar to Full Frontal, Leigh and Cummings are a fictional couple recently re-united and planning to celebrate by throwing a 6 Year Anniversary party for their close friends in the business and the neighbor couple they hate with a passion. Cummings is a novelist who's recently been offered the job of directing the film adaptation of his latest book, and Leigh is a famous actress of the stature, we would gather, of Holly Hunter or Sharon Stone.

Invited over are Kevin Kline and spouse Phoebe Cates (though their names are changed they play themselves and even bring along their real life children.) John Benjamin Hickey and Parker Posey (I believe it's the law that Posey appear in these kinds of films) play Leigh and Cummings' agent and financial manager and wife. Jennifer Beal plays a famous photographer who is a long-time pal and John C. Reilly plays a director who is presently shooting a film starring Leigh and Kline, who shows up with an arm-load of dailies along with his wife Jane Adams.

One of the major sources of conflict comes when Cummings invites Gwyneth Paltrow who has already been tapped to portray Leigh's character as a younger woman in Cumming's film. Like Kline and Cates, Paltrow is more or less playing herself, again with a different name. The other major source of conflict comes with the invitation of the celebrated couples neighbors - real life couple Owen and Greta Kline - a novelist and his wife who have caused a lot of problems with Cummings and Leigh's dog. At the behest of their agent the couple is invited in the interest of heading off any further acrimony so as to avoid legal action.

What makes The Anniversary Party so compellingly watchable is the voyeuristic aspect that the film offers. Anyone who has dreamed of what it would be like to attend a swank Hollywood party, will get a pretty good idea by watching this film. The dialogue and the layered dynamics that Cummings and Leigh have written into the film are incredibly observant and brutally candid. The neuroses and vicious back-biting are on full display and both the writing and the fact that the film is shot in digital video give The Anniversary Party an in-your-face realism that you can't help but admire.

The film stumbles in a few places, the first is an extended game of charades that devolves a bit too obviously into a show of true-colors. It could have been edited way down. Also a sequence in which each guest is called upon to make some sort of grand presentation to the Anniversary couple is a bit much. While entertaining in it's theatric way, it comes off as a bit too staged-feeling and also suffers from being overly long. Paltrow is the last guest to offer a presentation which she uses as an opportunity to give the couple a few dozen doses of ecstasy. Most of the cast are eager to partake and hence begins act three.

Many will probably write this act off as ridiculous, but I found it surprisingly effective. Along with the freedom and pleasure of the drug came the dispensing of all social restraints and as the kid-gloves are discarded the film becomes quite gritty and, at times, ugly. Feelings that have been muffled are laid bare and inhibitions fall away as do many of the actresses clothes. The emotions that come out swinging (particularly between Cummings and Leigh) are painfully truthful and revealing. Many things are brought to light, a few rough edges get smoothed over - but mostly the pent up neuroses that these characters keep masked with a drink here and a xanax there, rear their ugly heads and put a whole new paint job on the party. The biggest quibble I had with the film is a tragic devise that's added near the end of the film, designed to knit everyone back together - the film would have been stronger without it.

I admired this film a great deal, there is much courage on the part of alomst everyone involved and, despite the tack-on tragedy, the ending is near perfect. It put me in mind of the great line from Steely Dan's "Any Major Dude." "When the demon is at your door/ in the morning it won't be there no more." Or as Shakespeare summed it up Much Ado About Nothing. The Anniversary Party deftly demonstrates that the slings and arrows of a bunch of Hollywood types ultimately don't add up to a hill of beans. Great Film.