Just saw 24 Hour Party People. It's about Tony Wilson, who started Factory Records in the late 70s and recorded Joy Division and James and some other famous bands. It follows Wilson's career as club owner, record producer, and scenester from 1976 to the early 90s--long enough to watch everything come together and unravel again in a cocaine-induced blur.
Although I was very curious about this movie when it came out, I didn't see it because, first of all, it seemed to be all about Tony Wilson and not enough about Joy Division, and, secondly, people said it was too cute, with characters addressing the audience through the camera and that sort of thing.
As it turns out, the postmodern moments (Wilson turns to the camera at one point and announces that the second act is about to begin, or in another case comments on a scene just passed and explains its supposed symbolism) are just that: cute, sort of jokey, and, as in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, they don't disrupt the fiction as you'd expect them to. In fact, far from undermining or questioning his existence as a fictional character, they have the perfectly traditional effect of elaborating the character's extreme self-consciousness. Like most of the characters in 24 Hour Party People, Tony is, in his own mind, always performing for his audience.
This movie should follow the standard tragic arc, like Raging Bull or any number of other movies which portray a hero from the good, early days through decadence and ruin, but the arc is missing. In the first act, though everything is going well, no one seems really happy. All of the characters seem to be trying to escape their dreary lives and not really succeeding. The one great scene of the movie, in which Ian Curtis (the singer of Joy Division) hangs himself, perfectly captures this terrible malaise that overcomes him as he sits in front of the TV and realizes he has nowhere to go anymore.
So, though Wilson's life spins predictably out of control near the end, he doesn't have all that far to fall, and by the end of the film nothing has fundamentally changed. Far from being a defect, this gives 24 Hour Party People an unexpectedly realistic emotional tone. Whatever happens, the characters never get out of the predicament of being just who they are, no matter how pretentious they might be.
Posted by Alan Hogue at May 12, 2004 10:46 PMThose of us who were around to watch Granada Reports back in the late 1970s will still remember Mr. Wilson the jobbing reporter-on-the-spot, who always came across as a round peg in a square hole and whose earnest pretentiousness Steve Coogan captures quite well. (Is he still working for Granada?)
This man is allegedly based in part on Tony W.
Posted by: Alan Allport at May 13, 2004 05:58 AM