There’s nothing like family, a sentiment with which we all tend to agree – the only deviation comes in the form of determining whether it evokes positive or negative feelings in an individual, which is one of the reasons why it has become a topic frequently explored in every possible medium. Its the foundation for The Birthday Party, a film in which Miguel Ángel Jiménez adapts the novel by Panos Karnezis, which is set in 1975 and follows Marcos Timoleon, one of the world’s richest men (and someone who has spent his entire career asserting his influence wherever possible, which makes him one of the most powerful men in the world), as he throws a party for his daughter on his remote island off the coast of Greece, inviting a range of guests, from the political sphere to entertainment industry, to join in the festivities. What initially presents itself as nothing more than a celebration of family and friends eventually reveals itself to be far more sinister, particularly when certain revelations come to the surface, changing the festivities into a battle of wits between an eccentric billionaire, his self-centred family and a rogue’s gallery of sycophants and leeches, each one wholeheartedly dedicated to taking advantage any way they can. The ideas that inform this film are certainly fascinating, and as someone who has been working steadily (albeit without receiving too much attention), the director is a good fit to bring the novel to the screen. However, it is also a film that does encounter a few challenges that never quite manage to work themselves out, leading to The Birthday Party being slightly flawed, never attaining the level of complexity that we would hope from this material – and ultimately, everything about this film can be traced back to its slightly more heavy-handed execution and tendency to struggle with tone, which doesn’t honour the source material quite as well as we would expect, despite having a few very strong elements that make it nonetheless entertaining, even at its most obvious.

The appeal of The Birthday Party comes in how it doesn’t demand too much thought on the part of the viewer – while we do appreciate a film that can challenge us, sometimes the effort that goes into interpreting certain ideas can be daunting, which is something that the director and his cohorts attempt to avoid with this film. At its core, this is a story about wealth in its various forms – it’s not the first instance of hedonism being the subject of an entire film, but rather one that touches on ideas that are far more direct and unfurnished. Much like the novel, The Birthday Party draws a lot of inspiration from the life and times of Aristotle Onassis, who the protagonist is modelled after, and whose business ventures and personality were the primary inspiration for telling this story. While most of us tend to view his life through the lens of his relationship with Jacqueline Kennedy (placing him squarely in the history of American politics in the 1960s and beyond), there was much more to his life than we realise, and while not a biographical account by any means, it does take its cue from his story, leading to a film that quietly and methodically unravels to reveal a story of the upper class and their tendency to present themselves as arbiters of taste and the very definition of elegance, when in reality they deeply insincere and malicious, their entire existence being built on trying to assert as much influence as far as possible. The themes that Jiménez uses to construct the story are easily recognisable –  these are people who would like to imagine that they define the best of humanity, when in reality the inverse is probably more likely, as they represent the worst of society, with their delusions of grandeur, inability to form meaningful connections and tendency to view everything as a business transaction (including those that have to do with the most intimate parts of someone’s life) being the core of the discourse used to lay the foundation for this story. As the narrative unveils itself, we are given fascinating insights into the lives of these people as they engage in a malicious game of cat-and-mouse, with Jiménez doing what he could to cast as wide a net as possible, capturing every nuance of the story and its overarching inspirations.

The process of putting a film like The Birthday Party together involves finding the right actors to bring these ideas to life – and no one could have been a better choice than Willem Dafoe, our greatest living American actor and someone whose extraordinary versatility and ability to say so much with very little has been at the root of his longevity. Any other actor would see the role of Timoleon as an opportunity to play to the rafters, taking the larger-than-life nature of the character as an excuse to go over the top, which would have been understandable considering both the story and how the character is written. Dafoe chooses to go in the other direction – Timoleon becomes a mousy, reserved man built from quiet malice rather than being too hysterically villainous, and it’s the silent moments that speak the loudest in terms of this performance, which is perfectly calibrated to represent so much more than we would imagine based on a cursory glance. We are never quite sure if Timoleon is the hero or villain of this story, and Dafoe is the right person to play on this ambiguity, shading in the various nuances of the character in a way that is consistently surprising and quite sincere, even when he is skirting around the edges of sinister cruelty on a few more occasions than we would expect. The supporting cast is decent but unfortunately don’t quite match Dafoe and his energy – Vic Carmen Sonne plays the airheaded daughter with a lot of sincerity, the revelation of her true motives late in the film showing layers of complexity, while the always wonderful Emma Suarez does the best she can with the thinly-written role of the family’s long-suffering matriarch sidelined by a egomaniacal husband that she cannot wait to divorce, for both the financial gain and increased sanity it will bring to her life. Joe Cole tries to hold his own against Dafoe as his primary adversary, and while he is consistently eclipsed by the veteran actor, he still manages to surprise us in several scenes. Primarily an opportunity for Dafoe to play another eccentric character, The Birthday Party does make good use of its ensemble, even if they don’t quite match the overall tone of the film from time to time.

There are still some flaws that prevent The Birthday Party from being truly great, one of which is the inability to choose a specific tone. Dafoe has said that he looked towards films like The Leopard and The Godfather when it came to building his performance, but it also seems like the director was following the same approach, trying to blend class satire, familial melodrama and social commentary into something that simply could not bear the weight of all of these ideas without feeling like it is falling apart at the seams. Jiménez doesn’t seem sure of the tone of the film, and as a result, we find that it’s caught in between heightened melodrama and scathing socio-economic commentary. The problem is not in the genres that are present, but rather those that are missing – this was a fantastic opportunity to make a darkly comedic account of the decadence of the elite and their tendency towards going too far to satiate their taste for luxury. There is a notable lack of humour in a film that was based on a story built on an undercurrent of black comedy, and the dour tone does ultimately weigh the film down significantly, since not only does it feel too overly dramatic with a sense of monotony, but it makes it seem like it was not sure of the direction in which it wanted to move, an unfortunate development for a film that could have been vastly improved with slightly more work done in terms of developing the tone. The filmmaking itself is spectacular, with the island location on which the film is made being one of the most beautiful corners of the world. Jiménez takes full advantage of the setting, capturing so many sweeping landscapes that it becomes worth watching for the cinematography alone. Unfortunately, stunning images are not enough to compensate for the tonal imbalance, and ultimately prove to weigh this film down slightly too much throughout.

While it does have some strong ideas and some genuinely beautiful filmmaking, The Birthday Party does fall just short of greatness, never being able to be more than merely good as a result of a few small issues related to tone and how the underlying ideas are communicated, which makes it a very flawed effort, and one that needed more time in both the writing and editing process, particularly in reconciling the objectively beautiful filmmaking with the more unspoken qualities. Nevertheless, this film does deliver on the majority of its promises outside of these small flaws. It’s very entertaining, particularly in how it is essentially structured as a lavish melodrama about the excess of the wealthy and how they consistently get away with exploiting the entire system, solely because of their status. It doesn’t do enough to challenge these perspectives, and can sometimes even feel like it is fawning over the themes rather than condemning them – but it ultimately does prove to have a lot of potential in itself, which is at least enough to hold our attention and keep us wholeheartedly engaged. It loses its momentum halfway through, which is where the humour should have become the focus – there is no reason for Jiménez to have made such an overly serious film, since a more comedic take (one that kept the bleakness of the story intact, but infused it with layers of pitch black humour) would have just highlighted both the story and the director’s intentions, which are clear enough for us to know that this isn’t a celebration of the wealthy, but rather a scathing critique. Flawed but still solid enough, The Birthday Party does all that is required, but unfortunately, very little else, which is why it will be seen as more of a well-crafted curio than it is a brilliant work all on its own.