macaulay culkin, seth green
chloë sevigny, natasha lyonne
dylan mcdermott
unfashionable observations rating: C-
Party Monster tells the story of Michael Alig (Macaulay Culkin), a gay club kid who becomes king of his kind by masterminding outrageous club parties in New York City. As he climbs to the top of the social ladder, he discovers that the pitfalls are immeasurably deeper from the summit. To keep his unstable emotions at bay, he seeks out the comfort of heroin, crack, and ecstasy. He is thereby transformed into a megalomaniacal fiend bent on consuming more of everything—drugs, stardom, and friends alike.
When Michael then boasts to his best friend (Seth Green) that he has killed his drug dealer and roommate, we see the face of a boy whose passion for excess truly knows no bounds. In his ethics of excess, life itself becomes disposable—so much so that he can still smile as he tells his murder story.
Macaulay Culkin and Seth Green deliver the most perplexing performances of the year. Playing two extravagantly gay club kids, they instantly divorce themselves from the kinds of roles we know them to play. However, they are both fully self-aware of the characters and the material, and so is the film itself. Indeed, the entire film is one big melodrama in the strictest sense of the word: Overacting, overabundance, and over-the-top. The film recognizes that it’s telling the story of characters too big for their own lives. The theme of excess is therefore not just in the story—it’s in the performances as well. Extravagance is the norm, but that’s okay, because that’s the point.
As peculiarly clever as it may think itself to be, Party Monster is ultimately just an experiment that never quite works. While it manages to prove that excess itself can be too excessive, we are left wondering why such a self-evident proposition is worth making in the first place.
I’d give Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s Party Monster a C-.
