Flak Magazine: Review of Panic Room, 3-29-02

From the title on down, the promotion of Panic Room has revolved around its simplicity. There's a tiny little room with thick steel walls. There are monitors connected to cameras all around the house and a secure phone line that doesn't work. The family wants out, but the crooks want in, because what they want is in that room.

The David Fincher enthusiast is thrilled. Finally, we have cast aside all the sociopolitical underpinnings and reached the proto-Fincher movie: people having severe interpersonal problems in a big empty house with no light fixtures. They've booked an overqualified cast that can bring a certain understated elegance while Fincher back-burners the no-concept plot to make room for his whiz-bang, "Hey Mom! I'm tracking through one of Ed Norton's pores!" visual direction.

The Academy Awards broadcast, however, gives the young moviegoer pause. They don't make movies that are just about a room. Movies uplift, inspire and enrich. Dreams are sown in that garden patch called Hollywood, and six reels later, Jim and Judy America reap the hearty bulghur wheat of fresh idealism and fierce national pride! How can there exist a movie, in this medium whose width and breadth are no less than those of the indominable human spirit, that's simply about a fortified walk-in closet?

And that is when, with a sinking heart, the Fincher fan realizes that the kid must have telekinetic powers. That's what they want in that room. That, or there's a trapdoor that leads to the tunnels of the Crocodile Men. Or a videotape of the president doing keg stands with Hank Williams Jr. There must be some third-act shenanigan that wrecks the claustrophobic beauty of the film's central conceit.

Thankfully and impossibly, this is not the case. There are no spoilers to be had for Panic Room, because, for better or worse (better), this gory little haiku of a movie can be neatly summarized in a 30-second television spot. Sure, there's something that they want in that room, but Fincher & Co. know they needn't dwell on it. Comparisons to Hitchcock should begin with the utter indifference that is shown to this film's ostensible MacGuffin. Remember or care how Jimmy Stewart broke his leg in Rear Window or what brought Janet Leigh to the Bates Motel?

Panic Room makes no apologies for its narrow gaze. Simple actions and words are put at a premium when they aren't used to buoy a Message of Personal and Social Importance. No one in this film learns the redemptive power of love. There is no ragtag little league team. No one gets the girl after realizing that they should just be themselves and there is no iconoclastic doctor played by Robin Williams. This is not the best summer of anyone's life.

Fincher and screenwriter David Koepp are working toward entirely different ends. They've constructed a domestic chess game where the pieces are misplaced cellphones and backyard grills. They've stripped the suspense film down to its barest elements, and the jolts are all the louder for the lack of static. The cast, for the most part, gamely realizes that it's the Davids' show and pounds and shrieks on cue. Jodie Foster strains for things just outside her reach (repeatedly) with admirable self-respect. Dwight Yoakam has driven himself to a place halfway between Clint Howard and The Leprechaun for his role as the dangerously crazy thief. Forest Whitaker shines brightest by deftly handling his part as a more reluctant intruder. In lesser hands, that kind of character can become mired in contradiction, alternately cruel and recalcitrant as the plot demands. Here, as in Ghost Dog, Whitaker binds up all his actions in the same sad, desperate energy. Jared Leto strikes the only sour note, spitting and snarling pointlessly in an embarassingly hammy turn. Apparently being paid by the flail, he brings a touring-company Tyler Durden shtick to a film with no need for it.

The character that looms largest over the film, however, is David Fincher, first through skill and then by reputation. In the first act, Fincher skillfully uses the camera to explore and define the layout of the entire house, turning the audience into armchair home invaders/defenders when the chases begin. Fincher calls a play that few directors bother with anymore and makes our mental map of this house a critical element of the suspense. There are few if any film spaces of the last 15 or 20 years that a viewer feels that he or she could actually find his or her way around (Air Force One in its eponymous film comes to mind). The fact that the construction of space is so elaborately established and then cashed in later during the highly geographic chase scenes is the strongest current of Hitchcock that runs through Panic Room, and it stands as a validation of Fincher's busy visual style that it is used here to such practical effect.

Once the violence ramps up, the director's record as a shock inducer pushes somewhat clichéd suspense situations to dizzying heights. His body of work indicates that he is not hung up on the pulled punches to which moviegoers have become accustomed. On movie screens today, people point guns at each other just to keep their arms warm. Hails of bullets narrowly miss James Bond, and he lives to whack another regiment of faceless henchmen. When a lead character is put in real jeopardy, there can be no question that some circumstance will intervene and preserve the order of right and wrong. That, in its way, is the worst kind of film violence: flippant and consequenceless.

When the gloves come off in a Fincher movie, though, the audience has no such reassurance. This is the director, after all, who set Michael Douglas up as a porn freak and left him for dead in Mexico, and made Ed Norton shoot himself in the head and keep right on talking. Having an Oscar or your name above the title is no guarantee in a Fincher film that you'll make it to the end credits in one piece. This breaks the spell cast by a hundred deathless G.I. Joe gun battles and makes the audience feel fear again. There is a single punch in Panic Room that makes the audience wilt in a way that a thousand more last-minute bomb defusings never will.

After all, this is the director who beheaded Gwyneth Paltrow. In Fincher's world, we can have a suspense film with no safety net and, at long last, some genuine thrills.

— Matthew Fisher (roger_thornhill@hotmail.com)