People in high society are often deeply flawed and tend to use their wealth and social status as a mask for their anemic personal wounds. In the end, success is meaningless without the capacity to love. If you didn't already know that, feel free to spend eleven dollars and 90 minutes of your life to allow writer-director Alan Hruska to make this point in his incredibly unremarkable, unoriginal and downright uninteresting new film, "Reunion."
The reunion in question is between the former members of a Yale secret society. Ten years after the death of one of their own, the gang has come back together to discover their late "friend's" secret, and in the process, discover who they really are. (I put friend in quotations because the characters are so shallow and loathsome that genuine camaraderie is well beyond their grasp.) Of course, that's what real people are like, huh?
Christopher McDonald ("Happy Gilmore," "Requiem for a Dream") is the most recognizable name and face in this ensemble of one-dimensional upper-class scumbags. He is also the only actor worth watching, although he has the shameless task of playing the holy fool, a drunken narcissist who behaves horribly but still knows the truth about everything and everyone. He mercilessly hams up a storm in order to create an unspoken bond with the viewer, one that happens through a mutual understanding of just how sophomoric the whole project is. His co-stars, who seem to think they're in an important film, include Ben Stiller's skeleton, the crazy octuplet lady, John Walsh dressed as a hedgehog and Jessica Simpson,who decided to borrow Lisa Rinna's lips for the duration of the shoot.
To be fair to the others, it is difficult to give anything close to a good performance when your dialogue is nothing but exposition. A dialogue-driven film is absolutely fine as long as the dialogue is worth listening to, and nothing is more excruciating than one character who speaks entirely in plot points. Worse still, a dozen characters speaking exclusively in plot points is nothing short of cinematic water boarding. In a moment of transcendence, one loathsome cardboard cut-out says to another loathsome cardboard cut-out, "Being with you is boring." It's like the film itself was crying out to its director to end its suffering once and for all. Sadly, Hruska finished it.
Calling "Reunion" a film is an act of kindness. At best, it's a rehearsal for a play that somebody recorded with a two-dollar camera and shipped off to a movie studio run by monkeys. At worst, it is evidence that Hruska has a career in the film industry despite the fact that he knows absolutely nothing about the language of cinema. Even the worst film majors in the world, the most untalented and unsophisticated schmucks wasting their professors' time and their parents' money, could put together a single shot that would be more compelling than the entirety of this film. It wouldn't play in a cinema, on a broken television set or even on the minuscule screen of a cell phone.
Somebody is giving Hruska the money to keep making films and further establish himself as an auteur, even if the budget of "Reunion" wouldn't be enough for Steven Spielberg to blow his nose. Meanwhile, Hofstra students are regularly raising money on their own to make beautiful, ambitious and inspired films to be screened for their peers at every semester's HFC Film Festival, which will sadly never receive a theatrical release because they aren't feature-length. Let this fact sink in a little. Depressing, isn't it?
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