Garden Party

If you’ve ever studied the patrons in a seedy Los Angeles burger joint and felt a queasy sense of vertigo, it is the same sinking, slightly panicky sensation I had while watching Jason Freeland’s film “Garden Party.”
Most of the characters in this low-rent answer to Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” are young loners adrift in the torpid, sleazy no man’s land conjured by the words Sunset Strip. They are either running away from something, like April (Willa Holland), a pretty 15-year-old who flees home after noticing her stepfather ogling her in the shower, or show-business hopefuls like Nathan (Alex Cendese), a Nebraska farm boy of uncertain sexuality who hopes to be a dancer.
The most likely to succeed is Sammy (Erik Scott Smith), an aspiring singer-songwriter who suggests the “American Idol” contestant David Archuleta, were Mr. Archuleta to land on the street and find himself living hand to mouth for a few months. Catnip to both sexes, Sammy will do what he has to do to put a roof over his head for the night. In his spare time he’d rather smoke pot.
These and other characters who randomly cross paths as the movie wanders along are simultaneously tough and vulnerable. If they have shells hardened by pop culture and fool themselves and others into thinking they are sophisticated, underneath they are lonely young people vulnerable to predators, especially photographers offering easy money if they will take off their clothes for the camera.
Sally St. Clair (Vinessa Shaw), the godmother of this motley bunch, is a real estate agent who grows and sells high-quality marijuana and employs first Nathan and later April as assistants. Sally, who was probably much like the people now working for her, has lost whatever softness she once had. In the movie’s nastiest scene, she enlists Todd (Richard Gunn), a besotted fan of years-old soft-core pictures of her on the Internet, to kidnap the photographer and get them back.
Like few other movies before it, “Garden Party” makes you aware of the ravenous maw of the Internet when it comes to flesh peddling and how the unholy nexus of computers, reality television and pornography (both soft and hard core) has fostered a generation of casual exhibitionists for hire. Everywhere there is marijuana to blur whatever qualms they have about exploiting themselves and to help them put off until tomorrow the things they should do today.
Whatever else it may accomplish, “Garden Party,” which is clumsily structured but well acted, with pungently realistic dialogue, puts you in a world without a center in which you can’t tell upside down from right-side up. But one thing you know: As long as you remain there, you are not going anywhere at all.
Da The New York Times, 11 Luglio 2008