'peter's Friends"
A recent entry in the class reunion sweepstakes is auteur Kenneth Branagh's latest bid, "Peter's Friends." The class reunion is an endearing genre which got its contemporary initiation with John Sayle's unpretentious 'The Return of the Secaucus Seven." Ironically enough, what started out as a sincere recording of history has long since become a farcical, relentless championing of middle-class values.
Peter (Stephen Fry), a young, friendly upper-crust patrician sort has inherited his family's English manor upon the death of his father. In a questionably premature - as well as possibly immature - act, he invites the other five members of his college vaudeville troupe to spend the holidays. Peter arranges this ten-year reunion, a way of looking back, as he tries to sort out his future.
Included in this circle are a charming alcoholic television writer, Andrew (Kenneth Branagh); his pretentious and vulgar "queen of the sit-coms" wife, Carol (Rita Rudner); a publisher's agent, Maggie (Emma Thompson), whose seeming life's ambition is to score a best-seller for her firm and lose her chastity somewhere along the line; another trouper, Sarah (Alphonsia Emmanuel), whose chastity was lost so long ago as to forgo a claim check; and the final two former members of the troupe, Roger and Mary (Hugh Laurie and Imelda Staunton), whose rocky marriage is founded uneasily upon their debt to maternity and a career established on television commercial jingles.
The scenario of such a gathering is easy to predict - beautiful people in high to middling-income occupations wringing their hands together. Has everyone's career has taken the correct professional course? Have all the necessary wisdom teeth have been successfully extracted? And, hey, (as an afterthought), what the bloody heil went wrong after college, anyway? Ranging from the resolute politically correct Sayles through Lawrence Kasden's maximally-yupped ex-Wolverine "Big Chill" seven, and John Hughes' proto-yup (puppies?) high school-apocalyptic "Breakfast Club" five, I tend to judge such films with a deadly simple criteria - do I really want to know these people?
Each of these seven caricatures has a oddly affective quirkiness which makes them individually endearing, but collectively they'd probably make the average film-goer want to bury his or her head face-down in Peter's plush and comfortable living room divan. And all this dreary fare is coming from a film which is supposed to be a comedy?
Admittedly, somewhere in the core of this film was the kernel of a good idea. Seven friends in a little turn-of-the-year reunion at the request of one of their own does sound like a promising premise. Yet why do it so superficially? Especially after similar mishandling by a litany of other filmmakers?
All the same, it's this writer's belief that the issue of friendship is a pertinent - even important - issue for cinema to grapple with. Ridley Scott's "Thelma and Louse" scratched at the surface of friendship and working-class women, while Dennis Hopper's "Easy Rider' looked at male bonding. Both, however, copped out by the end of the film's credits. One has to turn to Mike Nichol's "Carnal Knowledge" (talk about intense class reunions) for such penetrating psychological insight into interpersonal group dynamics. This humanistic depth isn't to be found anywhere near Branagh's latest flick.
It's therefore admittedly a form of cheating to report that the scorecard on "Peter's Friends" is a wishy-washy, lukewarm, maybe yes and maybe no ...and further, to report that this inconclusiveness, in turn, says everything that needs to be said about the film.