Lean ‘Party’ worth your time

For Greenwood and Anderson, a crescendo in ‘Phantom Thread’

SBy Lindsey Bahr

ally Potter’s new film “The Party” is 71 minutes long. That fact alone shouldn’t necessarily be a selling point — stories need as long as they need — but when superhero movies and comedies regularly extend well past the two-hour mark, it’s hard not to appreciate the restraint.

And it is a rich and layered 71 minutes that Potter spends, in black and white, with a group of highly educated and highly dysfunctional people gathering for an intimate dinner party at Janet (Kristen Scott Thomas) and Bill’s (Timothy Spall) London house to celebrate Janet’s appointment as the shadow minister for health.

You know going in that things are going to spiral out of control. The first shot is of Janet, distressed and disheveled, pointing a small handgun at a mystery person on the other side of the door (and, essentially the viewing audience). Then the film jumps back to the beginning of the evening and you spend the dizzying duration watching the well-heeled crowd unravel.

It’s a delightful grouping of actors, including Patricia Clarkson as a cynical and blunt American, April, and Bruno Ganz as her German husband Gottfried (who April informs the group early on that she is separating from). There is Martha (Cherry Jones), a cool and collected women’s studies professor, and her pregnant, emotional, and slightly neglected partner Jinny (Emily Mortimer). And then there is Tom (Cillian Murphy), a skittish banker who arrives last and without his wife, who he says is stuck at work and will arrive later which sounds more and more like a lie the more he repeats it. Then he immediately heads to the bathroom to do a few lines of cocaine.

Bill, too, is acting strange. He’s almost catatonic as guests start to arrive, seated in a chair in the middle of the living room and limply holding a glass

at the box office lately, thanks to the draw of Sara Bareilles, the musician who wrote the songs for “Waitress” and is starring in the show through March 11. Sales were of wine, but Janet is too busy to notice between cooking her elaborate canapés in the kitchen and juggling incessant texts and phone calls from someone she is clearly having an affair with.

Potter follows various characters throughout the evening, sometimes overlapping action and dialogue of different scene partners. Each of the five characters gets their own arc and crisis of conscience and moment of release too — something you can’t say of many movies.

While it is wickedly funny and deft, this crowd is also not one you’d clamor for the company of for any extended amount of time. But, it is a fun experiment to be a fly on the wall for this bizarre night — a little dinner theater canapé that’ll make you laugh and think and be grateful (hopefully) that your friends aren’t this kooky. By the end, you’re ready to call it night too.

And, in the spirit of Potter’s lean film, we’ll keep this review briefer than usual too.

“The Party,” a Roadside Attractions release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America “for language and drug use.” Running time: 71 minutes. Three stars out of four.

The prospect of Jonny Greenwood — the notoriously spotlight-averse Radiohead multi-instrumentalist and classical composer — in a tux at the Oscars is especially tantalizing to “Phantom Thread” director Paul Thomas Anderson.

“He said, ‘Either you come and you’re dressed like an idiot, and that’d be brilliant. Or you come and you have to say something on stage, which would also be brilliant. So win-win for me,’” Greenwood said in a recent interview. “It’s a kind of abuse, really, the way he treats me.”

Just as Daniel Day-Lewis’ obsessive fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock and his muse Alma (Vicky Krieps) carve out their own twisted harmony in Anderson’s sublime comic romance, so too

particularly robust in the weeks when Bareilles overlapped with Jason Mraz, another pop musician who helped boost traffic. have Greenwood and Anderson found an idiosyncratic equilibrium. “Phantom Thread” is their fifth film together. Since 2007’s “There Will Be Blood,” Greenwood has scored all of Anderson’s films (2012’s “The Master,” 2014’s “Inherent Vice”), and in 2015’s “Junun,” Anderson documented Greenwood’s trip to India to play with Shye Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express.

What makes them such a good match?

“Like any good long-term relationship, I’d say mutual respect and date nights,” says Anderson.

“He has faith in me and he likes making fun of me,” says Greenwood. “I think they’re the two prongs of the perfect relationship, really.”

“Phantom Thread” marks a new crescendo for their collaboration and for Greenwood as a composer. The film is up for six Oscars, including best score — Greenwood’s first Academy Awards nomination. That, in itself, rights what many consider a grave wrong.

Greenwood’s shrieking, unearthly music for “There Will Be Blood” is widely considered among the best film scores of the last two decades. But it was ruled ineligible for the Oscars because it was based partly on preexisting music: Greenwood’s “Popcorn Superhet Receiver,” a harrowing, dissonant piece in which Greenwood instructed the string section to play with guitar picks.

“Phantom Thread” is a love story, albeit a warped one, and it called for a more traditional orchestral score full of warmth and romance. Those are qualities not only uncommon to Greenwood’s previous film work, but much of Radiohead’s fraught and restless catalog, too. When Greenwood sent Anderson more typically dark music for the first scene, Anderson pushed him to write something more romantic. On the finished score, the first sounds you hear are 32 strings at once.

McPhee, who appeared on the fifth season of “American Idol,” has starred for the last four seasons in the CBS series “Scorpion.” She played one of the two central characters in “Smash,” the musical series about the making of a musical that was aiming for Broadway. That show-within-the-show, “Bombshell,” has taken on a bit of a life of its own, with cast members reuniting to do a concert version. (RTRS)

LONDON:

Scores

British diver Tom Daley and screenwriter husband Dustin Lance Black have announced that they are to become parents. The couple is pictured in an Instagram photo Wednesday holding a picture from a baby scan.

A spokesman for Daley confirmed that “Tom and Dustin are thrilled to share that they are expecting their first child in 2018.”

Daley, 23, and Black, 43, announced their engagement in 2015 with an announcement in the Times of London, and wed last year.

Daley has competed at three Olympic Games and won gold in the 10-meter platform event at the 2017 world diving championships.

Black is an American screenwriter and director who won an Academy Award in 2008 for his screenplay for “Milk,” a biopic of gay-rights campaigner Harvey Milk. (AP)