Another sprawling ensemble tale about the hearty, equal portions of
hard knocks and moral nondiscrimination that Los Angeles dishes out, Garden Party centers on a bunch of dreamers and schemers looking for
their next fix — which is sometimes emotional, and sometimes illicit.
Among others, there’s 15-year-old runaway April (Willa Holland), who
poses nude for the Internet; sexy, pot-dealing realtor Sally (Vinessa Shaw, below right), and her dense, live-in assistant, Nathan (Alexander Cendese);
Todd (Richard Gunn, below left), a well-off, porn-addicted painter; and Sammy (Erik
Smith), a just-off-the-bus aspiring rocker who isn’t above trading his
way up to get his talents recognized. Naturally, their stories all
intertwine in kinky, twisted fashion.

Writer-director
Jason Freeland (who gave good crime in his last screen credit, a
little-seen, criminally under-regarded 1998 adaptation of James
Ellroy’s Brown’s Requiem) here seems to be reaching for early Paul Thomas Anderson by way of Tom DiCillo. Garden Party
never really strikes you as real, per se, and neither is it some
fantastically canted satire. The metaphorical perspicacity of the title
is a real stretch, to say the least, and there are plenty of moments
where one is laughing (albeit silently) for reasons probably
unintended. And yet, oddly, it doesn’t totally matter. Garden Party
may have the diverse colors and tonalities of a bank of wildflowers by
the side of the road (there’s an impromptu gay club dance-off here, a
ball-gagged home invasion there), but there are discrete pleasures to
be found, especially in Shaw’s wry, devilishly alluring performance.
She steals the film, in bewitching fashion — though one gets the feeling
she’d leave you saddled with a mortgage you couldn’t begin to afford. For more information on the film, click here. (Roadside Attractions, R, 89 minutes)