Gossip
USA/Australia 2000
Reviewed by Edward Lawrenson
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
US, the present. Students Cathy Jones, Derrick Webb and Travis share a flat. At a party, Derrick observes the arrival of Naomi Preston, daughter of a wealthy businessman, and her boyfriend Beau Edson. Spying on the two in a bedroom, Derrick watches Naomi and Beau smooch before Naomi drunkenly falls asleep. Later, Cathy, Derrick and Travis agree to spread a rumour that Beau and the reputedly chaste Naomi had sex that night, and to write up the effects of this falsehood as an assignment for one of their lecturers, Professor Goodwin.
The rumour spreads and soon reaches Naomi. With no memory of the event, she contacts the police, who charge Beau with rape. Cathy admits to the authorities that she made up the rumour, but they refuse to believe her. Later, she discovers Derrick went to the same high school as Naomi. After having sex with Derrick, she travels to his old school; looking through the past year-books, she deduces that Derrick and Naomi were a couple. When asked about this, Derrick admits to spreading the rumour because Naomi accused him - falsely, he says - of raping her. Derrick then visits Naomi and admits he, not Beau, raped her that night.
Back in the flat, Travis tells Derrick that Naomi has committed suicide. Some time later, a detective, Curtis, turns up to question Derrick about Naomi's death, which he's treating as homicide. With the net closing in, Derrick attempts to flee, but Travis pulls a gun on him. In the ensuing struggle, Cathy is accidentally shot. Derrick then angrily admits to raping Naomi, at which point Travis and Cathy - whose injuries were simulated - admit to pretending that Naomi had killed herself and faking a police inquiry in order to coax this confession, which they secretly filmed, out of Derrick.
Review
There's a moment in Gossip when rich college kid Derrick tells his flatmate Cathy to stop worrying. The two are responsible for spreading a rumour - which they know to be false - about their fellow student, the glamorous Naomi Preston. Except what started out as a mischievous prank has turned nasty, landing Naomi's boyfriend Beau in jail for rape. "This is an ugly turn," Cathy remarks, with some understatement, but Derrick is unfazed: "It's all just words," he says. He's wrong, of course: as played by James Marsden, Derrick is a smoothly amoral character with a nice line in Nietzschien asides ("Naomi's weak, she's always been weak" is his chilly reaction to her apparent suicide). And it's pretty clear from early on in the film that he's the villain of the piece, for all his emollient delivery and simulated sincerity.
The screenplay by Gregory Poirier and Theresa Rebeck is thick with intrigue and elaborate attempts to wrongfoot the audience. In the film's final reel, the sky is inky black and the rain unrelenting - but while the weather is pure noir, Gossip's characters lack the moral ambiguity for Poirier's myriad plot turns to work. Derrick is slick but untrustworthy (even his sumptuous apartment, packed with designer desirables, points an accusatory finger at him, as if he's house-sitting for American Psycho's Patrick Bateman); Cathy might indulge in the odd student prank, but there's a wholesome decency about her character which is barely dented by the events of the film (she comes from Plymouth Rock, and Derrick needles her about her "pilgrimatic" sense of moral rectitude); and the last of the gossip-mongers, Travis, an art student who spends most of the film creating a rather tacky collage about the guilty consequences of the rumour he helped spread, is too much the mousy, sensitive type to be embroiled in any dark double-dealing.
Gossip's one standout moment is a montage sequence, handled with some flair by director Davis Guggenheim (who worked on episodes of ER and NYPD Blue), depicting the way the rumour about Naomi spreads across campus: accompanied by Graeme Revell's frantic orchestration, the fairly unremarkable news that the supposedly chaste Naomi and her boyfriend had sex at a college party is embellished with sordid details, whipped up into a scandal as it passes from one mouth to the other (filmed in tight close-up). As with the rest of the film, the dialogue here is smart, the one-liners zippy, the caustic asides piercing; but there's something sadly apt about all this disembodied gabbing. Predictable at every turn, glossy but stagy, and full of unengaging, underdeveloped characters, Gossip too is "all just words".
Credits
- Director
- Davis Guggenheim
- Producers
- Jeffrey Silver
- Bobby Newmyer
- Screenplay
- Gregory Poirier
- Theresa Rebeck
- Story
- Gregory Poirier
- Director of Photography
- Andrzej Bartkowiak
- Editor
- Jay Cassidy
- Production Designer
- David Nichols
- Music
- Graeme Revell
- ©Warner Bros.
- Production Companies
- Warner Bros. presents in association with Village Roadshow Pictures/NPV
- Entertainment an Outlaw production
- Executive Producers
- Joel Schumacher
- Bruce Berman
- Co-producer
- John M. Eckert
- Associate Producer
- Susan E. Novick
- Production Co-ordinator
- Lori Greenberg
- Unit Production Manager
- John M. Eckert
- Location Manager
- Keith Large
- Assistant Directors
- Tyrone Mason
- Simon Board
- Stephen J. Morrison
- Cassandra Cronenberg
- Script Supervisor
- Daniela Saioni
- Casting
- Lora Kennedy
- Canada:
- Diane Kerbel
- Camera Operators
- Kevin Jewison
- Keith Murphy
- Steadicam
- Keith Murphy
- Visual Effects
- Balsmeyer & Everett
- Special Effects
- Co-ordinator:
- Martin Malivoire
- Supervisor:
- Kaz Kobielski
- Technician:
- Jason Board
- Art Director
- Vlasta Svoboda
- Set Decorators
- Michelle Convey
- Enrico A. Campana
- Collage Artist
- Robert Reinhardt
- Collage Photographer
- Lara Porzak
- Key Scenic Artist
- Cameron Brooke
- Costume Designer
- Louise Mingenbach
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Susan MacLeod
- Key Make-up
- Marilyn Terry
- Key Hair
- Veronica Ciandre
- Title Design
- Susan Bradley
- Titles/Opticals
- Pacific Title
- Conductor/Orchestrator
- Tim Simonec
- Music Supervisor
- John Houlihan
- Music Editors
- Ashley Revell
- Angie Rubin
- Music Score Programmer
- David Russo
- Music Mixers
- John Kurlander
- Mark Curry
- Soundtrack
- "Our Lips Are Sealed" - Poe; "Tape Loop" - Morcheeba; "Crash!" based on "At the Sign of the Swingin' Cymbal"
- - Propellerheads; "From Your Mouth" - God Lives Underwater; "Head" - Tin Star; "Thorazine" - Danny Sabel; "Panik Kontrol" - Psykonsonik; "Skullsplitter" - Hednoize; "The Look of Love" - Dusty Springfield; "Disconnected Child" - Tin Star; "After All" - Marti Frederiksen; "Serge" - The Folk Implosion, includes samples from "Requiem pour un con" - Serge Gainsbourg; "You Don't Know" - Curve; "Glow" - James Marsden; "Mean to Me" - Tonic
- Choreography
- Clarence Ford
- Sound Mixer
- Douglas Ganton
- Re-recording Mixers
- Rick Alexander
- Christian P. Minkler
- Supervising Sound Editor
- George Simpson
- Sound Editors
- David A. Whittaker
- David E. Stone
- Elliott Koretz
- ADR
- Mixer:
- Thomas J. O'Connell
- Supervising Editor:
- Michael J. Benavente
- Foley
- Artists:
- Alyson Dee Moore
- David Lee Fein
- Mixer:
- Marilyn Graf Hubbard
- Editor:
- Michael Chock
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- John Stoneham Jr
- Cast
- James Marsden
- Derrick Webb
- Lena Headey
- Cathy Jones
- Norman Reedus
- Travis
- Kate Hudson
- Naomi Preston
- Marisa Coughlan
- Sheila
- Sharon Lawrence
- Detective Kelly
- Eric Bogosian
- Professor Goodwin
- Edward James Olmos
- Detective Curtis
- Joshua Jackson
- Beau Edson
- Kwok-Wing Leung
- Chinese man
- Mif
- doorman
- Poe
- female singer
- Vicky Lambert
- Kenya Massey
- club dancers
- Noam Jenkins
- bartender
- Stephanie Mills
- Rebecca Lewis
- Raven Dauda
- Andrea
- Kristin Booth
- Diane
- Novie Edwards
- Ms Waters
- Shanly Trinidad
- Marie
- Samantha Espie
- Leslie
- Christopher Ralph
- Bill
- Kristen Holdenried
- Bruce
- Deborah Pollitt
- Gina
- Balazs Koos
- Rick
- Robin Brülé
- Louise
- Sadie LeBlanc
- Erica
- Elizabeth Guber
- Grace
- Roman Podhora
- Detective Ayers
- Marc Hickox
- Paul
- Jessica Greco
- Charlene
- Alexia Landeau
- Sasha
- Bill Lake
- Lieutenant Miles
- David Nichols
- Professor Vindaloo
- Sanjay Talwar
- taxi driver
- Timm Zemanek
- high school principal
- Norma Dell'Agnese
- Danbury typist
- Mairon Bennett
- Vlasta
- Marc Cohen
- Officer Stevens
- Charles Guggenheim
- Derrick's father
- Marion Guggenheim
- Derrick's mother
- John Wills Martin
- the stranger
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Warner Bros Distributors (UK)
- 8,121 feet
- 90 minutes 14 seconds
- Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS
- In Colour
- Prints by
- Technicolor
- 2.35:1 [Super 35]