MOVIE REVIEW: The Birthday Party
Image courtesy of Quiver Distribution
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY— 2 STARS
LESSON #1: THE PROTECTIVE PARANOIA OF WEALTH— The filthy rich do not reach that top-tier socioeconomic status without a sizable lotus of control. Throughout their ascent, they have likely worn proverbial targets on their back to the point where competition is fierce, demands are high, and threats of intrusion are very real. Age into a parent or grandparent with that kind of wealth around you, and securing one’s legacy will be a new, obsessive goal. That aim, happening underneath a public microscope, will make one protective and paranoid. The Birthday Party, the first film in six years from Seagull director Miguel Ángel Jiménez, casts living legend Willem Dafoe to occupy that very privileged and disturbing headspace.
The four-time Academy Award nominee stars as Marcos Timoleon, a stylish mogul arranging an opulent birthday celebration for his 25-year-old daughter—and sole surviving heir—Sofia, played by Vic Carmen Sonne of The Girl with the Needle and Holiday. The gathering is taking place at the vast Timoleon homestead on a private isle amid the Diapontian Islands near Corfu, Greece. Several years ago, Marcos lost his favored son, David, whose grave notably occupies a family plot overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.
The hired help, highlighted by a trusted security guard named Kostas (Life in a Beat’s Antonis Tsiotsiopoulos) and a demure maid Katia (Elsa Lekakou of Killerwood), a confidante of Sofia’s, is hard at work making everything ready for the well-to-do guests arriving by boat. A few steps of strangeness beyond his morning stretching session in the nude, one of Marcos’s more odd and hands-on ongoing preparations is outfitting a medical room with hospital-level care and surgical equipment. Seeing the man’s age and hearing his instructions of urgency, like the stern line “Everything needs my permission,” our best guess is a private medical need of his own. Beware, a future and more monstrous revelation of the room’s purpose will come to light before the end of The Birthday Party.
LESSON #2: WHO’S DOCUMENTING EVERYTHING AND WHY?— Moreover, spliced throughout the camera work of Libertad cinematographer Gris Jordana and edited by The Others’ Nacho Ruiz Capillas are cuts to voyeuristic black-and-white stills snapped of the proceedings and shots of a rolling tape recorder capturing all of the phone calls and house chatter happening in and around this enormous soiree. Someone is documenting everything, but who is it and for what purpose? Once again, our suspicious gaze turns to Willem Dafoe’s highly positioned lead trying to control every aspect of this event.
LESSON #3: COMPETING AGENDAS— Also preparing for the day, with a different spectrum of more passionate emotions, is Sofia. She’s been looking for her independent place within the hierarchy since the death of her brother. Sofia is secretly pregnant out of wedlock with a British journalist (Joe Cole of Peaky Blinders) who is collaborating with Marcos to pen a movie script of Marcos’s life story. She plans on dropping those bombshell pieces of news today at the birthday party. Like those grasping threads of loyalty to the Corleone family in The Godfather trilogy, competing agendas fill the dialogue and orbiting supporting cast inclusions, away from the music and dancing on display. The party has lulled people in, and now the demands, threats, and traps are laid.
With the central father vs. daughter strife at its core, The Birthday Party plays like a very decadent daytime soap opera with better production value and overall talent across the board, which can only go so far. Gris Jordana’s shooting loves to linger between scene transitions a few beats longer on the expensive surroundings supplied by production’s borrowed mansions and the despondent expressions of witnesses unfazed by the partying debauchery and tenuous conflicts as reminders of how out of reach this reality is. Likewise, the film’s music, combining piano-centered compositions by Alexandros Livitsanos and song by Prins Obi, creates an intoxicating aura that can coyly mask nefarious intent.
LESSON #4: THE SELFISH EVILS OF HEREDITARY POWER STRUGGLES— The Birthday Party comes down to the behind-closed-doors power struggle between Marcos and Sofia that is washed uncomfortably for the public eye. Willem Dafoe conveys a dread of mortality that is forcing a rich man’s hand towards terrible decisions he’s willing to see to their conclusions. Matching his spoiled gender and generation, Marcos laments the bitter, resentful women in his life, takes it out on Sofia, and offers zero apologies for his actions. In response, Sofia is a bold young woman out to prove that some things can’t be bought. Sonne attempts to match Dafoe’s edge with a fierceness of her own for a character standing up to the man who’s always controlled her, making this night a crucial turning point for the entire Timoleon family.
Once the candles are blown out and wishes are made in The Birthday Party, literal fireworks foretell dramatic ones to come, as the decorum of the gathering swerves more sinful once the effects of drugs and booze take over. The question becomes who and what is left standing by the following morning. You can be certain Willem Dafoe’s indomitable old bastard will be. A master of all things moody and mysterious, Dafoe is the chief reason to approach this narrative based on Panos Karnezis’s 2007 novel of the same name, mirroring the life of Aristotle Onassis. The enigmatic star, singing and dancing at a few points, is granted all latitude to explore the framed space, and the camera is entranced to follow him. However, back to its ugly soap opera traits, outside of actively worshipping Dafoe completists, absorbing the undesirable heights of Jiménez’s bleak film is hard to recommend.
LOGO DESIGNED BY MEENTS ILLUSTRATED (#1421)
