As one could easily gather even just from the title, Gossip is ostensibly about the power and danger of idle rumors and slander. A group of journalism students decides to test their collective theory that rumor, particularly false and popular rumor, becomes truth via widespread belief by spreading around a story about a wealthy girl, one who is hitherto known to be, so to speak, prudish (I really need to come up with a better term here…). What starts out as a smaller fib grows into allegations of rape, causing quite the firestorm.
As potentially engaging and whatnot such a study could be, I found it to be a bit of a smokescreen for social politics, particularly in the sexual and intersexual arenas. And some of the views are, frankly, strongly ambivalent. No, not ambivalent, inconclusive. And that’s what makes the examination so strong.
It’s one thing to actually take some of the views brought up here concerning gender roles, gender politics, sexual politics, personal identity, and everything else and run with them, taking a certain stance and passing judgment, usually on the opposition. What happens here, instead, is a number of views, of perspectives, is presented amidst the social chaos of a rape accusation and investigation. None of the threads a fully expounded upon, a potential weakness, but then they’re never fully reckoned, allowing the viewer to make up their own minds. It may not be the fullest, most intelligent, or even the most realistic depiction of circumstances, events, and life, but it is intriguing and thought-provoking (and argument-sparking) nonetheless.
This compelling theoretical foundation is occasionally obscured, however, by the influence of the late ’90s/early ’00s cinematic sensibilities rampant on screen. Director David Guggenheim, later known for well-polished documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman (and the recent He Named Me Malala), shows his bent toward high stylization, especially in the vein of executive producer Joel Schumacher. The film has been overedited, given a firm shellacking of post-Matrix spins and intercuts, and infused with a strong sense of the strangely surreal being passed off as normal: Do clubs like that exist? And are they popular among New England J-school students? Who lives in and decorates a loft that way? And, as admittedly cool as it sort of is, who lacquers their wall with artwork like Norm Reedus’s Travis? It’s all so, well, fake, as excruciatingly exaggerated as some of the rumors in the film. It does thicken the film’s atmospheric soup, reinforces the problematic and chaotic tenor of the proceedings, but it also allows the issues involved to be shrugged off as pure melodramatic symptoms of the medium itself.
This, plus some questionable writing from the minds that brought us Tomcats and The Spy Next Door (not to mention the almost universally-reviled A Sound of Thunder), is somewhat overcome by some solid performances from Lena Headey, the aforementioned Reedus, and a gleefully overdoing-it James Marsden.
This ain’t no perfect piece of anything, but it does get some discussions going, and it serves as an entertaining depiction of turn-of-the-century post-adolescent egocentrism and sociopathy, basically a younger, differently-angled take on similar subjects tackled in American Psycho.
Allusions of Grandeur 