On the surface, Gossip has a lot going for it. Beneath the surface, it's finally just a turgid teen drama that makes little-to-no lasting impact.

There's a famous line in The Man Who Shot Libert Valance: When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. Gossip takes that to heart. It wonders about the increasing blurring of the lines between legitimate media and the tabloids and what happens when rumors evolve into facts. The premise begins interestingly enough as three friends (chip-on-her-shoulder poor girl Lena Headey, shy artist Norman Reedus, and rich and charismatic James Marsden) decide to start a rumor and chart its progress to fulfill an assignment in what appears to be a communications theory course (taught by Eric Bogosian!). They decide to spread the rumor that pure-little-rich-girl Kate Hudson and the totally-undeveloped character played by Joshua Jackson had sex at a party. Innocent enough, right? That is until the rumor mutates into allegations of rape and it becomes clear that one of the gossip-mongers has more at stake than just their term paper.

Thanks to ace cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak (The odd couple Speed and Terms of Endearment, among other things, though he may now better know for directing Exit Wounds and Romeo is Bleeding), Gossip looks like a Sharper Image catalogue. This is especially true in the impossibly nice apartment that the three leads share. The light hits every product perfectly, it's a miracle that the closing credits didn't include a notation like "Everything in this film is available at www.living-beyond-your-means.com." Bartkowiak and director Davis Guggenheim (husband of Elisabeth Shue and son of respected documentarian Charles Guggenheim) are also at their best in several scenes at bars or parties — flashing lights, diffusion filters, and cool clothes bring out the best in this duo. It all plays like an artistic commercial either for the products onscreen or for the very strong soundtrack featuring poe, Mocheeba, and Propellerheads. And no matter how bad things get for any of the characters, the cast looks really good at all times.

The film's principle problem is that it's never sure just how serious it wants to be. Sometimes Gossip feels like a satire of both college movies and of our various media obsessions. As long as the characters are just giggling about a one-night-stand, it's innocent fun and there's much light humor to be made about how reputations can evolve from virgin-to-wh*re (who knew this was a word you can't write on Epinions?) in just a few degrees of separation. But it runs into trouble when the major plot catalyst becomes a series of date rapes that may or may not have occurred. I guess the escalation from sex to rape was necessary to amp up the plot, but the change jeopardizes any kind of tone that the film might be striving for. The film can't be satirical about date rape, can it? No. So instead the tone becomes leaden. Since the plot remains ambiguous on the rapes, none of the characters seem to know how to react to each other and the tension suffers. The character interactions are wildly inconsistent and seem to suggest that the film was chopped to bits before its release. Or at least I'd like to believe that there was a version of this film where the relationships made more sense.

The film is never entire sure who it wants us to sympathize with or hate and the gaps in the narrative make this even worse. Clearly Lena Headey is supposed to be the moral center of the film, but in the second half she virtually disappears. Norman Reedus's motivations are obscured and finally boring. And James Marsden's performance doesn't vary enough to build either support or hatred from the audience. And this is saying nothing about the fact that at least Marsden and Reedus look five or ten years too old for the parts they're playing.

While the three leads are uninspiring, Gossip has a surprisingly deep cast of both up-and-coming actors and old veterans. Despite their relatively minor parts, Joshua Jackson and Kate Hudson were given full-on star treatment in the film's promotion, but both characters are problematic because they're made out to be both victims and totally unsympathetic characters. And surely the film is supposed to be trying to convince us that gossip is a potentially dangerous thing, rather than that gossip is dangerous, but that you can probably avoid its consequences if you're good looking and rich. Also, Jackson's character is named "Beau" and I make it a strict policy never to sympathize with a character named "Beau."

As the professor whose assignment sets the whole thing in motion, Bogosian is stuck with dialogue that makes him seem like the kind of teacher whose classes students take because they get to watch TV and listen to theory that was obvious and in vogue two decades ago. Sharon Lawrence has a shrill role as a rape investigator who refuses to believe the truth when she hears it. And Edward James Olmos is slick, but not really acting in a scene towards the end as a cop.

In the end, is the only point of Gossip that rumors can be dangerous? Is there a suggested theme that academia and tabloid journalism have also blended together? And why is the film's conclusion so darned clunky? It's tough to answer these questions. And it's tough to care. Everybody in Gossip is really nice to look at (especially Kate Hudson), but at the end of the day, it's tough to care about any of it.




Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older