A catcall movie: One I make fun of, because either it is eminently mockable or I am out of step with its conventions and pretensions
(One of this derivative klunker’s few items of wisdom is how duct tape is our friend; and its depiction of handling type 1 diabetes is bad news—on which see End note 2.)
[Slight edits were done 8/31/12 and on 9/20/12.]
I believe I first saw Panic Room when it was released in theaters about 10 years ago. In a way, it strikes me the same now as then: sleek, well-engineered, but with rather implausible/extreme violence/action at the end.
After my mini doctoral dissertation on American Gangster, both you and I would like to loosen up and have a little fun. But with Panic Room, I realize there’s also room to call a movie down when it seems over the top with its pretensions, excesses (that it seems not aware of), etc. And we can find these lie in more than just the violent denouement, but in a host of other aspects. I realize this film has its fans; its Wikipedia article seems to handle it all respectfully, solemnly…maybe in view of its main stars, not least Kristen Stewart, who was all of about 11 when this film was made.
Also, David Fincher, its director, seems a hot property; he made The Social Network (2010), the esteemed film on the founding of Facebook from two years ago, which I did not see. His experience has been in commercials and music videos, and he seems to wear his cinematic influences on his sleeve (more on this soon); but I found on watching Panic Room twice this week that, even on the first viewing, I became jaundiced enough pretty quickly to have a few “catcall” remarks—mocking little lines you could call out watching certain shots or scenes (examples will come below), as was done with programmed brio in Mystery Science Theater 3000 or in the old days by the audience with The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
Of course, Panic Room wasn’t made for this sort of mockery, and for me to want to mock it this way may show how out-of-step I am with certain modern film conventions. This one indeed seems to fit in with a certain current youth esthetic, and I don’t mean to seem like an old fogey as far as this is concerned; plenty of now-long-esteemed directors and their typical work were derided when they were current (e.g., Hitchcock). But I will try to explain my alienation from this film in stages.
Setup, plot elements, amid heavy style influences
A mother and daughter move into a home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a building that the plummy-voiced property manager/whatever refers to as a townhouse/brownstone, or a “townstone,” I think he playfully calls it once. The first night the duo are moved in, three thieves break in, and the movie generally follows a busy carnival ride of real-time mayhem, not least involving a sort of high-tech safe room that the mother and daughter hole up in for much of the time, the “panic room”—which is also the location of the treasure, bearer bonds left by the house’s previous owner, that one of the thieves was supposed to inherit and now, never mind why, wants to steal.
The plot and setup are fairly simple; the goings-on are rendered very carefully, with attention to detail, a fancy set-derived interior (no way could a big New York townhouse be as cavernous as this one seems), and both atmospheric tracking, hovering, etc. shots and CGI-finessed tricks such as the camera going through a coffee-pot handle, etc. The movie strikes me as rather pleased with itself with all the fancy visual stunts it can pull off, while it also clearly imitates Hitchcock with the roving camera, Kubrick with the Shining-like tracking shots and general empty-house ambience, and even Roman Polansky with some visual resonance, and a slight plot resonance, with Rosemary’s Baby. (The title sequence even readily invokes Rosemary’s Baby, with New York
To me Panic Room is both smugly technical and so derivative of its influences that you seem almost distracted by these facts; meanwhile, the writing of the script—which could be taken to allude “edifyingly” to a certain soulless materialism of upscale Americans, though how pointed this is on the writer’s part is unclear—seems to leave very little room for any sort of “philosophical” or broadly social comments. Even in Hitchcock we could get this nod to the audience’s having a brain. Panic Room doesn’t even deign to explain some of the details of the daughter’s type 1 diabetes (e.g., why not respect our intelligence enough to explain that the shot she needs is of insulin?), on which topic I’ll say more below.
The net result is a carnival ride of a movie, with seemingly every moment crammed with excitement and little invitation to really think about how silly some of this is. What humor there is seems to reside mostly with the thieves, and there it seems to arise from their being types, and largely clownish or mean ones at that (Junior and Raoul, respectively).
Foster and Stewart in their burden to bring female spirit to a muddy setting
Jodie Foster stars as the mother, Meg Altman, looking early on like a dweebish yuppie in ugly eyeglasses as she is ferried to this house by a real estate agent, with her scooter-riding daughter in tow. Daughter Sarah is played by Kristen Stewart, with rather-boyishly cut hair here, and who has her characteristic smart eyes and that certain slight moodiness that seems (limitedly) to be at the center of Stewart’s charisma and appeal as an actress. Stewart is a young actress whose current fame makes her the subject of a sort of personality cult, not unlike Jennifer Lawrence, and also she is the subject of tabloid coverage, lately concerning the breakdown of her relationship with British actor Robert Pattinson. I’d rather not venture too far into discussion of her beyond the specific purview of how she fills out a film role (and in the future I hope to examine an example of her more mature work).
But it’s interesting how, today, Stewart’s appeal has a certain je ne sais quoi, maybe with a certain emphasis on our “I know not what” about the root of her appeal. Not quite so much in evidence in Panic Room, but I think incipiently there, she doesn’t have a smiley appeal, or a clear sex appeal, or a heavy cuteness element. She is attractive but has a sort of sullen air, not so much a bratty type as of a certain nascent emotional expressiveness that seems stuck in an adolescent shorts-in-a-twist emotional awry-ness. This reading is to judge from critics’ fairly unanimous discussion of her, and from the few times I have seen her act. Perhaps it is her “developing adolescent” emotional quality that has made her so central to the Twilight franchise which now seems so much to define her career; but of course, every young star—a great example is Jodie Foster—develops her chops as an actor of adult roles too, so Stewart has some work cut out for her if she’s to have a stellar future.
Meanwhile, this is all neither here nor there as in Panic Room she seems quite suited to the quality of an 11-year-old where she has a certain somber quality and a manner in which she is apt to push back at will in discussions with her parent, yet has the pre-sexy plainness of a potato lacking any condiments. Also, not quite beautiful yet, Stewart seems to have a bit of a pig nose here.
Foster, for her part, seems tapped to bring a certain feminist bravado to her role, an earnestness and ability to present some appropriate emotional heft. Yet her character ability seems not so much used to her credit here as is her simply being implicated in a plot and environmental morass-of-sorts. I found myself noting that, in this very visually oriented film—with well-framed shots, tight editing, high stylization—her rather sleek, neat-bird, statuesque features, including a rather beaky nose, seemed to fit in with the townhouse architecture so lovingly composed-around in the shots.
Amusingly, her husband, from whom she is recently separated, is described early on—in an almost hackneyed movie-script way of indicating character with a one-liner—via his career; he’s in pharmaceuticals. This is the general sort of lazy social indicator that, as to specific semantics, in 2002 would have connoted to the great unwashed that he is something special and respectable—nay, an almost Henry Jamesian character, ready for a novel within the realm of The Ambassadors, perhaps (but with the film-watching American peasant all agog: “Shet mah math! They said you wuz high-class, but ah didn’t think you wuz that high-class!”)—and no wonder his family has lived upscale, with two people ready to live in a massive townhouse. Today, having been involved in an outlying part of that business culture, I would say the Big Pharma exec connotes he is an uncultured dork.
(Later, when daughter Sarah is talking with nicest-crook Burnham and the issue of her father and/or family comes up, as to socioeconomic background, Burnham asks/suggests her father, or family, is rich; daughter says “My dad’s rich; Mom’s just mad,” or such. Whatever the line [I wasn’t going to watch this movie more than twice], it’s glib enough. The script is by David Koepp; I don’t know anything about him. Well, I just checked his Wikipedia page; fourth most-successful screenwriter of all time, it says. Let’s not go there, right now.)
Once the plot gets going, the unintended occasional comedy starts. We know this from one summarizing sentence in the film’s Wikipedia article: “On the night the two move into the home, it is broken into by Junior ([Jared] Leto), the grandson of the previous owner; Burnham ([Forest] Whitaker), an employee of the residence’s security company; and Raoul ([Dwight] Yoak[u]m), a ski mask-wearing gunman recruited by Junior.” This is not exactly high-concept, is it.
If you want empty entertainment, go ahead and watch this film; it’s over in about one and a half hours, and you will go for a ride. Don’t let my spoilers stop you. But if you have much intelligence, it’ll seem about as unredeeming to older viewers as that big bag of chips you spy on the supermarket shelf before the holiday weekend, and which jumps into your carriage unbidden, because one weekend of going to hell with them surely won’t throw your body for a loop forever.
The three baddies, some comedy-ready
Burnham fairly soon is clear as the crook who is most ambiguous, most relatable to us unpretentious folk, in terms of being in on a bad-intentioned heist, but also having a good side; and by the end he is the most helpful crook, putting a bullet-aided end to the mayhem that threatens to go on much too long (both for the characters before us and for us the audience). He is played level-headedly enough by Forest Whitaker, a rather stocky Black actor, whose two differently sized eyes make him, per snap-judgment idiocy, “ripe to be an untrustworthy sort” (Whitaker’s roles in his long career have included a depiction of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the 2006 film The Last King of Scotland, for which he won an Oscar and many other awards). Movies have a way of using an actor’s physical quirks to mark him or her as the “eminent baddie,” even while some movies will play somewhat intelligently with our expectations, so that sometimes the different-eyed baddie turns out to have a heart of gold.
Burnham is also the big techno guy here, with a couple sizable bags of tools, since he is from the security company who had originally installed the house’s panic room. It’s interesting that, as the film heats up, his character—as is Stewart’s—is the only one of the main players whose behavior doesn’t cross over into histrionics. And it’s also their direct interaction, when he gives her an injection tied to her diabetic crisis, that we see one of the few truly human (non-cartoonish) exchanges in the film.
It’s a measure of how shallow this film consciously shapes itself that Burnham, one of the few not-entirely-two-dimensional characters here, makes a stab at self-reflection, and instead of the screenwriter giving him something quotable that people could mull over after viewing the movie, Burnham says something (to Stewart’s Sarah) banal like, “Sometimes things don’t work out as you want them to…”—and that seems about it. Yeah, like this movie.
Jared Leto, who seems the heist’s leader as “Junior,” partly because he was to inherit part of the treasure they’re after, is the mouthy asshole of the three baddies. He is a key spouter of the rapid, demanding comments as the crooks deal with thorny new challenges at various turns. In fact, the early scene in which all three crooks are on the ground floor talking among themselves, not least about the unexpected condition of there being people moved into this house already, seems a little too rapidly and toughly spoken to be followed in every detail (and I watched it, trying to listen carefully, twice). In general, this movie is tightly acted, but here things seem overdone in terms of tension and “snappishness”—an example of the movie trying to be hip about American hyper-action-readiness (which seems more a movie distillation that an echo of real-life virtuosity) but actually going too far in this regard.
Raoul, played by Yoakum, is the real evil one. First, the name: “Raoul”—no surname—sounds like a suspicious sort, no? And he always wears a ski mask. Plus, he’s packing heat, as we see early on. So, expect tough business from him.
He ends up usually being the one to talk most ruthlessly, and sometimes with a coolness or a hip humor that the truly sociopathic can have (at least in movies). We also find he’s a hideous coward, in that following his florid displays of ruthlessness toward others, when he gets his hand caught in the super-duper mechanized panic room door, he carries on in pain something awful, as if no one suffers like he does.
But what really ices the cake with him is near the end of the movie, when the over-the-top violence pours on: he’s been hit full-on with a sledgehammer, has fallen down a stairwell—and he keeps on coming, unstoppable like Jason from Friday the 13th. He’s not just evil, he’s Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil–type evil, pronounced “ay-vul.” (Actually, his type of Big Nasty is so 2002; a modern ay-vul thug would never do anything so gauche as to stump around with a sledgehammer when on his last legs. Instead, he would be an online-reputation manager for a large company, gaming Internet search results. He would trade in Raoul’s head lacerations and crazed eyes for designer clothes and a calm air of entitlement.)
Some catcalls, and more sober notes
So this movie sounds like a self-parody to an extent—if it isn’t a cold manipulator of a movie—but is it aware of this? No. So we are left with a few notes I jotted during my viewings, some added to “with afterthought”—some were original “catcall” material—on specific little points of interest:
* Duct tape, here as in real life, seems Americans’ only true friend (along with dogs) (see End note 1)
* Slow motion is used to draw out suspense at one point (not bad)
* No screw-top wine for Meg as she self-medicates in an indulgent soak in a tub
* Burnham’s heart as well as attention to detail is shown in his first being clued to the presence of a family—seeing a night light in a bathroom
* When Stewart’s Sarah goes into diabetic shock, she seems cadaverous and, in her casual clothes, looks like a reject from Woodstock
* For that matter, when Dad, Stephen Altman, has arrived (not the most generous personality for a Big Pharma grandee), and he is bloodied following a brutal once-over at the hands of ay-vul Raoul, he looks like, if he worked in medical media, he could say, “I haven’t felt this way since I lost the Topamax account”
* Morse code with a flashlight outside the air-vent hole: a smart detail I remembered from my first viewing of the film in 2002
* Both the bad guys and, later, Meg make a major fixer-upper of this tony brownstone with all the smashing around
* Stewart, despite a slug in the face from Raoul near the end, looks surprisingly OK in the immediate aftermath
* In the coda scene, with mother and daughter checking house ads on a park bench, even as they show bruises from their harrowing night—haven’t they learned anything?
End notes
1. Groucho Marx is alleged to have said, “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” Another famous quote that came to mind as I reviewed this film is something by Dr. Samuel Johnson, to the effect of, “He who makes a beast of himself with drink is thereby seeking to avoid the pain of being a man.” I tried to adapt this to a reading of Kristen Stewart, who acts with the neat modesty of a kid: “He who makes a beast of himself [like all the adult actors] with histrionic acting in genre pap is avoiding the pain of being an ever-hopeful youth [like Stewart].” Something along those lines….
2. As with any script that plays fast and loose with important details, this one muddies the waters about type 1 diabetes. We know Sarah has that, from the hanging on a thread, and the need for a “shot,” as she does/has. But other details? When Meg is with her in the panic room and hastily looks for “something sweet” for Sarah to eat in the rations there, this suggests her trying to treat Sarah’s hypoglycemia (abnormally low blood-sugar level). Later, Sarah needs a shot, which suggests she needs a quick dose of insulin, meaning she is at that point hyperglymic, i.e., has too much blood sugar in her system (due to insufficient insulin). For Meg to be bumbling around looking for a sweetie at one point, and for Sarah to be later in an emergency state requiring insulin, suggests a little ignorance (on Mother’s part only?) in keeping Sarah on balance as you would expect such educated people to exercise, leaving aside all aggravating factors like the crooks’ causing trouble. (I’m fussing a little over this partly because my father had type 1 diabetes and died indirectly in connection with it in 1970. He effectively enough handled his diabetes, including insulin shots, from 1956 to 1970. I was also afraid of coming down with type 1 diabetes in my late teens, and in an intriguing nexus of circumstances I can’t describe now, I took a glucose tolerance test in early 1984 when I was 22. I came out OK--I don't have diabetes, type 1 or 2.)
But also, consider the convulsiveness Sarah shows: not to fault Stewart so much (but more the director), this dramatization seems overwrought—one could almost joke she has “the mother of all episodes of constipation”—but I think her convulsiveness, for a diabetic, puts her a little beyond what a timely insulin shot might reverse. A booklet, Learning to Live with Diabetes, revised edition (Boston: Medicine In the Public Interest, Inc., 1988), notes that with symptoms of hyperglycemia including “…drowsiness[,] nausea and vomiting[,] headache…rapid breathing…loss of consciousness,” and convulsions aren’t mentioned (presumably because that would be even further into crisis territory, with the ones mentioned red flags enough), the treatment should be “Call your doctor or go to a hospital emergency room as soon as you notice symptoms” (p. 62)
For another source, the 17th edition of the Merck Manual (Whitehouse Station, N.J.: Merck Research Laboratories, 1999) remarks on the condition, arising from a state of type 1 diabetes not being fully under control, of diabetic ketoacidosis, which means “[m]etabolic acidosis [resulting] from the accumulation of ketones due to severely depressed insulin levels” (p. 177), symptoms for which include “polyuria, nausea, vomiting, and, particularly in children, abdominal pain” (p. 178). Convulsions aren’t mentioned, though what is mentioned is the possibility in untreated patients to “progress to coma” (p. 178)—which, in the movie, Sarah mentions as a possibility. Treatment includes, among other things, an italicized “Close physician supervision is required…” (p. 178).
