If you needed to hire a professional party crasher, somebody to intentionally ruin the vibes, Cillian Murphy is not the first person you’d call. Filmmakers and audiences alike have long fallen for him, thanks largely to how much he can put you at ease, and he just seems like a chill guy. Even when he’s been an outright villain, like in the Dark Knight trilogy or Red Eye, his ability to maintain a serene composure is a calling card that dupes both the characters and the audience. Granted, he’s occasionally played loose cannons with short fuses, where that composure is more quickly revealed to be a mask, like in Peaky Blinders or Free Fire. But one instance of Murphy going chaotic that has flown under the radar is in The Party, a 2017 film directed by Sally Potter. It’s a comedy of social etiquette errors about a charming get-together that flies way off the rails.
What is ‘The Party’ About?
The titular party is supposed to be for Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas), celebrating her getting a top government position in the Department of Health. The guests at the party include her husband, Bill (Timothy Spall); her friend, April (Patricia Clarkson), and her estranged partner Gottfried (Bruno Ganz); the committed couple of Martha (Cherry Jones) and Jinny (Emily Mortimer); and finally Tom (Murphy), whose wife, Marianne, who works with Janet, is running very late to the soirée. What’s meant to be a quiet occasion for drinks blows up into a complete mess as Bill reveals that he’s dying of terminal cancer and that he wants to leave Janet for another woman. Rather than go for something broadly messy or buffoonish like in a Meet the Parents-style comedy, The Party breaks down more like a Dogme 95 film such as The Celebration, where seemingly sophisticated intellectuals get broken down to their barest desires, none more so than poor Tom.
Tom Is More Bark Than Bite
Image Via Picturehouse Entertainment
The thing with Tom is that he actually isn’t as dangerous as he initially comes off; he’s just stressed out of his mind and on his last leg. His making an entrance to the party by immediately going to the bathroom to do cocaine and check the gun he brought primes you to think he’ll be a wild card, but he’s instead more of an irritably squeaky third wheel. See, the woman that Bill wants to leave Janet for is Marianne, and Tom already knows that and can’t live with the thought of Marianne being with anyone else. It seems he brought the gun to kill Bill (my guess is the cocaine is because he’s a finance guy), but he immediately knows he’s not up to the task, and so he just sweats and gripes his way through a crisis of conscience.
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Many of the characters have a vested interest in philosophical concepts like the validity of Western medicine and the state of feminism, and Tom uses such opportunities to insist he wants nothing to change and that he’s definitely a good person. There’s a satirical undercurrent to The Party that seems to be commenting on the state of Britain’s political sphere in 2017, and Tom could be a caricature of the modern yuppie figure, fixated on things staying the same and keeping money flowing, all while hiding serious vices and insecurities.
Cillian Murphy Becomes the Film’s Comedic Relief
Image Via Picturehouse Entertainment
I’m prone to assert that Cillian Murphy’s typically angelic features are smartly used against us to soft-sell the wormy loser that is Tom, but that would imply we were ever fooled by him. From the minute he first appears, that shaggy dog hair and those striking eyes are made oily and cavernous in the stark black-and-white cinematography, indicating that Tom doesn’t have nearly as much charisma as he thinks he does. In a drawing room comedy like this, where everyone is meant to be the butt of some kind of joke, Tom comes the closest to being pure comedic relief, and that’s where Murphy is able to save Tom from being a wet blanket. Tom is a masterclass in the kind of human train wreck that constantly insists that he’s fine even as he’s completely imploding on the inside, repeatedly going to the bathroom to, you guessed it, do more coke and avoid any responsibility.
Murphy is so funny in his desperation at holding on to what little life he had before the party, stubborn enough to put up a fight but also spineless enough to have no conviction in that fight. He can be funny both in how he simply darts in and out of the bathroom and when he permanently parks himself in the corner of the kitchen, ignoring the oven practically catching on fire because it makes no difference to him. He’d much rather stew in his own misery and not have the courage to fix his own life, which makes for one of the more recessive characters that Murphy has ever played, but it’s that novelty that’s part of what makes his performance so engaging.
The Party
Release Date
July 27, 2017
Runtime
71 minutes
Director
Sally Potter
Producers
Christopher Sheppard, Jim Reeve, Robert Halmi Jr., John Giwa-Amu