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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
This dizzying saga of the '80s Manchester music scene is garish, reckless, endlessly self-indulgent and totally untrustworthy. What a blast!
Aug 9, 2002 | The bad thing about "24 Hour Party People" is that it's blindly ambitious, garishly self-indulgent and reckless with the truth. The good thing is it knows all these things. And the best thing is that it might be a great movie -- certainly as good as almost any other fictional movie about rock 'n' roll, barring a classic like "A Hard Day's Night."
"24 Hour Party People," directed by Michael Winterbottom ("Wonderland," "Welcome to Sarajevo"), is based on real life and is about, in concentric circles of importance, British music, the Manchester music scene, Factory Records, Joy Division and the Happy Mondays, the Hacienda dance club and, finally, Tony Wilson.
The movie starts with Wilson, on a hillside, in the '70s, with a silly haircut and a hang glider. Wilson is a real-life TV reporter and host for Granada Television, a local station in Manchester. He will continue to work on TV, but will also become one of the principal owners of the influential independent label Factory Records -- home to great graphic design and the postpunk quartet Joy Division, which after the death of its lead singer, will become New Order. Plus, he's going to open England's most infamous nightclub. But first, he is going to crash into the hillside.
Wilson is played in "24 Hour Party People" by Steve Coogan, a British comic who in real life plays a fake television show host on, you guessed it, real television. The movie is aware of all these postmodern feedback loops, and will continue to throw them at us at a dizzying pace, culminating in a scene where we actually see the real Tony Wilson playing the producer of the fake Tony Wilson on a phony version of a real show that Wilson hosted. Phew.
"24 Hour Party People"
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
Starring Steve Coogan, Shirley Henderson, Sean Harris, Danny Cunningham, Lennie James, Paddy Considine
"24 Hour Party People" is one of those movies where the main character keeps popping out of the action to talk to the audience. But this movie takes that technique one step further. Here, actors actually step out of character -- not just the action. Sometimes, those actors are playing semifamous musicians, while the self-same semifamous musicians (Howard Devoto of the Buzzcocks and Magazine, Mark E. Smith of the Fall) have bit parts elsewhere in the movie. But it's Tony who breaks out of the action more than anyone else, explaining himself ("I'm being postmodern before postmodern was cool"), or dishing some salacious gossip ("He will go on to sleep with my wife") or delivering an arch line ("William Blake said the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom. I was headed there in a Jaguar").
That kind of shtick could get old fast, and it's a huge credit to Frank Cottrell Boyce's dense, playful script and Coogan's breezy delivery that it never does. You get the sense that the filmmakers aren't using the technique just to show off or be clever: They're doing it because it captures the sensibility of the period, and because that's supposedly the way semiotics-loving Tony really was. At times, it's dizzying. You're paying attention to a scene, laughing, wondering what really happened and waiting to see if the janitor in the bathroom is going tell you what he really saw 20 years ago, all at the same time. The film is just having too much fun, and the jokes just keep coming, one after another. One of the best laughs is the ongoing disaster of Tony's professional career: He thinks he's a serious journalist; his boss sends him to do a story on a duck who herds sheep.
But wait. If I can be humored to pull my own little Tony, I'd like to point out that you, dear reader, should be wondering what all of this has to do with the music scene in Manchester. And I would say that you make a good point. After all, this is by self-definition a movie about music in Manchester. Tony even says as much: "I am a minor character in my own story."
But that's really not true. "24 Hour Party People" is a movie about Tony Wilson. There's no broad survey of what, to American listeners and viewers, remains a fairly obscure music scene. Yes, pretty much everyone has danced to New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle" at some high school prom, wedding or class reunion, but who could sing one lick of a James song -- probably Factory's third biggest band? The bed is on fire with passion and love, sure, and then ancient history -- you know, the '60s -- is left untouched. Some of the city's best and most lasting bands from the period when the movie takes place, 1976 to 1992 -- most notably the Smiths and the Stone Roses -- are reduced to single mentions. Neither of them recorded for Factory.
But who wants to watch a movie about all-but-forgotten bands like A Certain Ratio (who are in there) and the Mock Turtles (who are, mercifully, not)? The rise and sputter of Tony Wilson is a better story, and it just so happens that as the founder of Factory, he was at the center of a lot of music. We see Tony at a 1976 Sex Pistols concert in Manchester, and we see actors playing Manchester punk group the Buzzcocks along with the group that would become Joy Division and a bunch of other rockers in a rather bleak room. And then we get an exhilarating look at clips from Tony's rock 'n' roll television show -- mostly London acts.
