Locked In

by Mark Netter

The much-admired opening credits of Panic Room, which feature the names of cast and crew as oversize 3D letters hovering ominously across huge Manhattan buildings, tell us immediately what the movie is about: architectural destiny, graphic layout, and spatial volume. In short, Panic Room is, relatively strictly, all about form.

Any highbrow interest in Panic Room is similar to any such interest in last year's Ocean's Eleven. That is, the chance to see a high-level contemporary directing auteur, coming off perhaps his most admired project, play with a standard studio genre pic. With Ocean's Eleven the main fascination came from knowing that Steven Soderbergh was operating his own camera, particularly in the opening scenes where the relationship of said camera to George Clooney had a direct artfulness to it. With Panic Room the interest is even more abstract, and if you came looking for a deep exploration of human character, you will be disappointed.

While the main thriller elements are in place - innocents under violent attack, trapped in a confined space, heavy use of real time - and often do their job, the big thrills of the movie come with the extended takes. The three movies Panic Room most recalls are Rear Window (single set, icy blonde in trouble), The Shining (methodic introduction of a large, psychologically-loaded living space) and Home Alone (the biggest payoffs are physical punishments to intruders). But the major technical coup is how much closer David Fincher takes us to Alfred Hitchcock's dream of a seamless movie.

Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope was ostensibly without cuts. He used eight-minute takes and hid the necessary cuts by making them when tracking across a character's back or the back of a chair, any trick that would work to give the sense that the cameraman never pressed the "stop" button. While Rope was somewhat stage-bound by the technical limitations of the day, the most bravura sequences in Panic Room are super-long takes seamlessly spliced together to create even longer takes, with completely convincing computer generated imagery used for connective tissue.

As Peter Bogdanovich recently pointed out, the longer the take, the more suspense for the audience. Will the filmmakers pull it off? Will the camera bump? Will the actors flub? Fincher goes further than anyone in memory to give a sense of multiple simultaneous action within a single shot, and his re-framings are enjoyably masterful.

The story underneath it all is serviceable enough and provides maybe just enough fodder for thoughts about form and content. Meg Altman (Jodie Foster), recently divorced, moves into an impossibly huge Manhattan townhouse with her teenage daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart). The master bedroom is equipped with a steel-fortified, video-monitor filled, self-contained sanctuary called (ta-da!) a panic room. Their first night sleeping over is interrupted by three intruders seeking a fortune left behind in a safe in that very room. Burnham (Forrest Whittaker) builds panic rooms and needs money for his own child custody battle. Junior (Jared Leto) is the rich kid who knows about the fortune and put together the "plan." Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) is the thug Junior hired to make sure Burnham stays the course. The robbers do not expect to find the new owners already moved in, but are not about to abort their mission. Meg and Sarah manage to lock themselves in the panic room, and the robbers work like hell to get them out.

Leaving aside the issue of why such a huge load of dough would be left behind after a home sale, the story does not stand up to heavy scrutiny, but serves as the hanger for a continuous set piece. Upon reviewing Fincher's previous movie, the epochal Fight Club, its own theatrical nature becomes increasingly obvious - the clear line-readings, the grotesquely squared-off stagings, the heightened and skilled stage combat. Theater of cruelty for the post-MTV generation.

Panic Room calls attention to its own theatricality right away, with the complex blocking of the actors and townhouse cameras, an extended take, with Ann Magnuson and Ian Buchanan showing Foster the house for the first time, Magnuson in particular hitting a Broadway-quality manner in her performance. The movie could almost be put on as a play, with its economic cast of characters and single-set staging, already a quasi-remake of Wait Until Dark.

Fincher is clearly having fun with the form, and tells us early on when Foster responds to a question about what her husband is known for. "Pharmaceuticals" is her one word answer. Yes, we're learning he made his millions there, but it is hard to miss the drug reference. Fincher seems to be telling us to get loaded, sit back, and enjoy the graphical mental space he's creating.

But Panic Room belongs to that class of nasty suspense movies that are sadistic to their audience, and in this sense it plays as a minor addendum to Fight Club. This is a world where we're all just raised by women, where no one is safe, and the one character we really care about, Forrest Whitaker (in another understated yet extremely sympathetic performance) is in the worst vise of all. The palette is the same as Fight Club, the oversized old interior reminds us of the house on Paper Street, and the progressive destruction of said interior reinforces the feeling.

It seems that some of the negative criticisms of Panic Room are about Fincher not creating enough suspense, or enough "original" suspense situations. Maybe so, but if the ultimate message of Fight Club was for each audience member to really think for him or herself, then Panic Room shouldn't be expected to treat us any more like sheep. Even the usual overall project of this genre is missing, that of reuniting the family. In every family suspensor, from Fatal Attraction to the latest John Travolta studio thriller, the end goal is always bringing 'em back together. If any form/content message can be read into Panic Room, it seems to be that when you trash the household, there's no going back.

All the main performances in the picture are top-notch. It's hard to understand the criticism of Leto's high-strung performance, as it provides the main humor breaks, albeit very cruel ones. Yoakam does a great psychopath in a ski mask, eventually channeling Jack Nicholson in The Shining, blood-drenched and mugging like a Roger Corman character. Kristen Stewart seems to be getting the torch passed to her from Foster, who made a similar impression at a similar age in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore with a similarly tomboy look and phenomenal acting confidence. Much like Stanley Kubrick, Fincher makes no bones about being completely on the side of the teenager, decking her in a Sid Vicious t-shirt and making her not only the mother's compatriot but also her coach.

For all the use of actors as graphic elements, emphasized by green laser beams crossing the screen or Foster's rectangular black glasses, the ensemble breathes life into the proceedings through street-level humor and a genuine world-weariness. At the center is Jodie Foster, a powerful draw for the picture. Nicole Kidman was originally cast and, when unable to take the part, suggested Foster. Good casting. For while Kidman is growing enormously as an actress (and always great to look at), Foster is the perfect match for the material, for two reasons.

For one thing, as someone who grew up in New York, Foster is actually convincing as a New Yorker, and as a certain type of educated New York sophisticate as well. She may have been living in Los Angeles for a long time, but she has the native intelligence for the character and never feels out of place. The other great thing about her casting, and what makes Panic Room something of a monument, is that this is the movie where we watch Jodie Foster turn forty. For those of us who have grown up with her in the movies, it is great to see how she's handled herself through all these years - with poise, intelligence, strength. While not physically prepossessing and perhaps less obviously glamorous than her contemporaries, she is aging beautifully, and it is pleasure to see her work - Foster has never seemed more attractive or cool. Due to the nature of the project, it is unlikely that she will get the accolades she deserves, but Meg Altman is perhaps the most believable performance of her career. Nothing is overplayed, not the chugging of red wine in the bathtub, not the sitting on the john, not the fight to save her daughter. Foster has never seemed so real, and with very little exposition we understand her character. There are none of the obviously "dramatic" choices that we've seen - and rewarded - in her earlier performances. She and Fincher would do well to work together again, as even with an abstract piece like this one, together they give us something always captivating to watch.

The rest of the pleasures are all formal. Like The Matrix, it seeks to give a little more intellect to the genre, with mixed success. The characters sneaking past each other in the hallways, the intercutting between the two teams (good guys stuck in room, bad guys trying to get them out) is deft and clever, all about point of view - we know things that one or the other party doesn't. The emphasized mechanical eroticisms, whether intercutting power-drilling with frightened females, or Leto humping the panic room door, are all funny yet just subtle enough. Moreover, as a Fincher "game" movie, it is tighter and clearly superior to his earlier The Game.

Maybe, like Rear Window, more will be thought of Panic Room later, as such formal projects often stand the test of time better than more emotional, hence more easily dated movies. Sure, it would be nice to get some reassurance that the movie actually meant something. Is there an underlying class message, being treated so deftly that we don't feel the ultimate irony? Is the ordeal somehow necessary for anyone to rightfully call themselves a New Yorker? This one's up for grabs. But if Rear Window, which looked like just a great thriller in 1954, earned reams of critical analysis over the ensuing half century on the nature of spectatorship and responsibility, perhaps Panic Room will someday be lauded for the very thing that may be limiting its critical acceptance right now.

©2002 Mark Netter
CineScene