Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
David Fincher is one of the best directors working right now. Make no mistake about that. He has a remarkable sense of composition, an innate ability to establish spacial relationships in a suspense or action moment, and a genuinely winning touch with performers, whether they're world-class actors or background players. Since his feature debut with ALIEN 3, he's been drawn to fairly dark material, building his films around whip-smart narratives that fucked with audience expectations. THE GAME and FIGHT CLUB were both hotly debated by filmgoers, and have rabid fan bases. He once said, "I'm interested in cinema that scars," and has been mentioned in connection with all sorts of projects, like FERTIG or PASSENGERS or SEARED or RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA or LULLABY or CHEMICAL PINK, all of which seem like challenges for different reasons.
What then are we to make of PANIC ROOM, an entirely professional and ultimately lifeless style exercise that marks nothing so much as proof that Fincher can color within the lines and make a studio movie just as pedestrian as anyone else?
David Koepp's script wastes no time with messy extras like characterization or exposition. After an unusual and edgy title sequence (disquieting despite being so simple), we meet Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart, a remarkably accurate version of a younger Foster) as they are shown a house by two realtors (Ann Magnuson and Ian Buchanan). On the tour, they are shown the panic room and told all its features. Sealed, impenetrable, with a phone line that can't be cut. It's as efficient as it needs to be, and there's a big red herring dropped about Meg being claustrophobic, something which is essentially useless for the rest of the movie, a dead end. Meg's getting divorced. She's mad at her husband. He's rich, and she's getting back at him by spending it. That's all we need to know. Then they're moved in, they're going to bed, and someone breaks in.
It's just that quick. The rest of the movie is what happens on that long night that Burnham (Forest Whitaker), Raoul (Dwight Yoakam), and Junior (Jared Leto) spend trying to get into the panic room. It's as quick a setup for a suspense film as I've ever seen. And it's not poorly done. But there's something lifeless about the affair. As I watched, all I could think about was the remarkable production design by Arthur Max and which cinematographer (Darius Khondji and Conrad W. Hall, one of Khondji's long-time operators, are both listed) shot which footage, and how smooth and propulsive the editing of Jim Haygood and Angus Wall is, and as far as the people onscreen were concerned, I didn't care. Not a bit. Because they're ghosts. They're types. They're never developed even slightly. In the first third of the film, Fincher's too busy flying his camera from one end of the house to the other, from the top to the bottom, using remarkable, illusory visual effects contributed by Toybox under the supervision of Kevin Tod Haug.
I've heard many a fanboy squeal about how cool it looks in the trailer when the camera goes through the handle of a coffee pot. The mere fact that, of everything they see, that's the detail that interests them, makes me think that this film is going to be a huge hit. Personally, I don't get the attraction. In FIGHT CLUB, Fincher's audacious camera work was a perfet complement to the brazen flood of language that Jim Uhls adapted so well from the original novel.
That wasn't his visual style in SE7EN, though, or in THE GAME, both of which featured an austere, solemn visual sense that made Fincher seem like the heir apparent to Kubrick himself. PANIC ROOM is his riff on Hitchcock, much like WHAT LIES BENEATH gave Zemeckis a chance to do his impression, complete with a surprising amount of unnecessary CG work. Personally, I got tired of the swooping camera about 15 minutes into the film, and by the time Jodie Foster took a seat on a toilet in the dark, I was genuinely afraid Fincher was going to swoop through the pipes and straight up the birth canal.
Fortunately, Fincher seems to get tired of it, or perhaps one of his two DPs managed to talk him out of it. At any rate, he stops overusing those shots and gets down to the business of locking Meg and her daughter in the panic room that no one can get into, and then turning loose the three other characters to try and get in. Forest Whitaker is the most memorable of the three, and that's thanks to the fact that he's the only character in the film that Koepp seems even remotely interested in. In fact, Whitaker alone forces me to recommend the film to you. Despite any other misgivings I have about the film, he gives one of those great, strong, quiet performances of his that remind you what a wonderful and unique presence he is in movies in general, and it's worth seeing. There's a moment late in the film when he realizes that he's been wearing a nametag during the entire robbery that he plays with the grace of Gene Kelly on a lamppost. And his final moment in the film is a primal and powerful visual moment that he sells completely, even if the numbing familiarity of the "twist" robs the moment of the punch it should have had.
Yoakam and Leto both do solid work here. Yoakam is a character actor who continues to impress me each time I see him. He's honest, and he gives nice, uncluttered performances. He's stranded by the script here, though, to being just some snarling thug. The most color he has in the film is his name, which doesn't seem to quite fit. Much of the film's mechanics are driven by his character, who simply exists as a plot device, a bit of business at all the right moments. Leto is at least given perfunctory motivations late in the film when the script fills in a few details, and there's a laugh or two to be had from the reveals, but for Yoakam, there's nothing.
When robbed of any and all emotional connection to the characters in a film like this, you're left with set pieces. So how is Fincher at orchestrating the tension? Surprisingly, he's just okay at it. There are moments where he works too hard, robbing the film of real tension by resorting to slow motion and the dropping out of sound at the exact moment you expect it. I'd say the most successful overall sequence involves gas being piped into the panic room, and Meg's explosive response. It's well-shot, even a little hallucinatory, and it's funny, due in large part to just how tense things get. But overall, I didn't feel like the film ever managed to sustain that sort of mood. The introduction of Meg's ex-husband Stephan (Patrick Bauchau) never pays off. He's a blank. And brief appearances by Andrew Kevin Walker as a sleepy neighbor or Paul Schulze and Mel Rodriguez as a pair of cops don't really pay off as suspense. I can tell that these scenes are supposed to be suspenseful, but they don't work. They're like unfinished sketches. Beautiful, polished, yet somehow unfinished.
As I think about this film, I feel like the Narrator of FIGHT CLUB, arguing with my own private Tyler Durden. One half of me says to shut up and sit back and enjoy the slick, but the other half can't disengage. I expected more from Fincher. I think he's a genuinely important filmmaker, and this feels like a waste of his time, no matter how accomplished. But who am I to say that? Maybe he just wanted to see how tight he could turn the screws for once, and he wasn't concerned about really etching characters. After all, BLADE 2 works primarily as a Grand Guiginol bloodbath, an exercise in twisted imagination. It's not a great script, and it's certainly not airtight. So why should I give that one a pass and not this one? Because this film never cuts loose enough to earn that level of pass. If it was a non-stop rollercoaster, and it delivered on the full promise of the set-up, or if it managed to twist the concept in on itself in some clever way that paid off our time in the theater, then I could say, fine, no problem, it's good enough. But it's not. And there's no substance to pick up the slack when the style isn't enough.
So take this as what it is, a mixed review. I think some audiences will like this a lot, and they'll be completely undemanding about it, and they'll get their money's worth when they buy a ticket.
Great. Cool. I don't dislike the film enough to try and dissuade you. Like I said, it's made with every bit of professional finish Fincher can muster, and it's technically impressive to behold. But here's the best way I can describe it: we've all had Big Macs. And everywhere you have a Big Mac, they're pretty much the same. In this case, the Big Mac is a generic Paramount-style woman in jeopardy empowerment thriller. Big Macs sell; DOUBLE JEOPARDY raked in the bank. You don't eat a Big Mac because you want great food. You just eat it because it's convenient at a particular moment, and it's familiar, and you know what you're going to get. Everyone once in a while, you eat a Big Mac, and it's like Wolfgang freakin' Puck himself slipped into the kitchen just to prepare that one Big Mac. The sauce is perfect, the bun tastes like real freshly baked bread, the meat is lean and tastes like actual beef, and the whole thing just seems about as good as a Big Mac can ever be expected to be.
But it's still a Big Mac.
And, dammit, I wanted more.
"Moriarty" out.
