24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE (Michael Winterbottom, 2002)

Reviewed: September 7th, 2002

24 Hour Party People -- for all its great acting and energetic, trampling verite style -- is flawed both in its haphazard plotting and its baffling belief it must elevate itself above its non-fictional roots. Not intent on merely making an exciting period piece about the Manchester music scene from the mid-seventies to early nineties, director Michael Winterbottom and his screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce have shot themselves in the foot by throwing in every kitchen-sink example of how to break the fourth wall. 24 Hour Party People is the one of the most self-aware films I've ever seen, and whereas occasionally, like in some comedies (Wayne's World, Austin Powers and some of the Farrelly Brothers' work immediately come to mind, not to mention Woody Allen's seminal wall bashing in Annie Hall) this technique can be momentarily effective, here it's just tiresome and pointless, needlessly taking you right out of the film every time it's employed (there's a very annoying sequence where suddenly the narrative is stopped dead in its tracks so that Wilson can flashback to all the cameos the real people the film is based on had; he then references one scene which has been deleted, and tells us it will appear on the DVD).

What the filmmakers fail to understand is that making a based-in-truth film and being self-aware inherently work against each other. Breaking the fourth wall's whole purpose, is in fact, to let us know we're watching a movie. Yet -- in my mind, at least -- the best biopics, or rather the best movies based on any sort of real-life events/people make us forget we're watching a movie, by accurately recreating and sucking us into what feels just like, well, real-life. And indeed, all of 24 Hour Party People's best sequences are those when it's pounding along, oblivious to the audience, using its handheld camera and its contrasty, on-the-cusp, inconsistent (non) lighting to illuminate a distinct time and place and scenery, be it a suicide, or a legendary blood signing, or a stunt gone wrong, or a blowjob in the back of a van.

24 Hour Party People stars Steve Coogan in a pitch-perfect lead performance as real-life Factory Records founder, Tony Wilson. He is an audacious, fascinating personality, and for my money, the film functions as a character study of him as well as it does anything else. Unfortunately, the filmmakers don't agree. After being carelessly thrust into a particularly random scene that comes out of nowhere (involving Wilson, surrounded by his children, suddenly at the deathbed of his second wife, whom -- aside from Wilson himself -- are all characters we have never seen in a single scene previous), Wilson turns to the camera and essentially says, 'I know you have no idea what the hell is going on right now, but by the way I got married to this woman and we had kids and I wasn't a very good father. None of that matters though, because I'm just a minor character and this movie's really about the music.'

Hey man, I beg to differ. Any film with a strong character who in is almost every single scene, who is not passive, whose decisions continually have the biggest effect on the course of the plotting, must be considered a lot more than a minor character. Even if the film claims otherwise the least it could do is back itself up and actually treat Wilson like the minor character it says he is. Why does it bother including sporadic, unimportant scenes that are confusing and self-admittedly superfluous?

I wish 24 Hour Party People was a more cohesive sum of its parts (suddenly we will be thrust into distracting, outlandish gimmicks that feel as if they're part of a different film; one deals with a UFO landing, the other with God). I wish all its individually (mostly) excellent scenes added up to a fuller portrait of that rare period when changes in youth culture and popular culture perfectly collided (a very worthy topic for a film, no doubt), as opposed to one specifically influencing the other. Perhaps the filmmakers bit off more than they could chew (I felt this particularly in the second half where long stretches of time are glossed over via montage and voice-over), and in struggling to condense so much information wound up with a cup of tasty Jell-O which has not quite gelled into the ideal polygraphic shape.

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