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Panic
Room (2002) Starring:
Jodie Foster, Forest Whitaker, Kristin Stewart
Director: David Fincher
Rating:
R
Studio:
Columbia
Review
Posted: 4.21.02
Spoilers:
Minor
By
Drew Taylor. | Read
Review
#1
Let
me start of my review of the film with an analogy of its
director, the dark-minded wunderkind David Fincher. Fincher
gets his report card, and scrawled across it, in fat, red ink is
a huge "A+." (He was given the A+ for
Fight
Club, his berserker masterpiece of modern male malaise.)
Armed with this sparkling report card, he heads to the
local Baskin Robbins. When there he gets the biggest, most
amazing sundae he could ever ponder. He loads it up with
everything: nuts, chocolate syrup, whipped cream, and he tops it
off with a plump, glistening cherry. The art of consuming
the dessert isn’t taxing, but the act itself is one of a
precise and joyous nature. It’s not challenging, but it
is fun.
Thus is Panic Room.
The movie starts out with a clever, unsettling, and
absolutely gorgeous title sequence. Those three adjectives
could be used throughout to describe the rest of the film, but I
digress. Fincher is becoming a director synonymous with
amazing title sequences (since Se7en),
and here he does it again (he even wanted to make the titles for
Fight Club unreadable). From there we meet Meg
Altman (Jodie Foster), and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart),
as they move into a new brownstone apartment. But this
apartment is a bit unique, as it is equipped with a ’panic
room.’ Long since commonplace in Manhattan mythology, it
is a room separated by a huge metal door and equipped with all
manner of security. Like a high-tech bomb shelter right
next to the master bedroom.
The newly divorced Meg and her diabetic daughter think nothing
of the room, besides it being an oddity, but on the first night
there, something terrible happens. In a dizzying sequence,
three intruders enter the house, trapping the two in the panic
room. This is when we meet Junior (Jared Leto), Burnham
(Forest Whitaker), and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam), the three
hell-bent thieves. Unsure of what they truly want, the
rest of the move is an extreme, violent, and unrelentingly
terrifying game of cat-and-mouse.
With a set-up like that, it’s a near surefire, although
wandering into the theater (on an opening night) I was still a
bit skeptical. I don’t like bringing this baggage into a
movie theater with me, but from all the reviews I had read thus
far, it seemed as though Fincher, in all his intelligence, had
chosen a poor script and not done anything with it. Needless
to say, I walked out of the movie with a dopey grin on my face,
utterly content (not to mention thrilled and excited) with what
I had just seen.
This is obviously Fincher’s riff on a Hitchcock-style thriller
(although he had already done that, although with a more
maniacal coldness, with The Game), but I feel like
comparisons between this and What Lies Beneath are way
off. They do share similarities (the use of computer
generated effects), but while Beneath literally takes
page after page, word for word, from the book of Hitchcock, Panic
Room merely uses it as a template for the terror. (Anyone
wanting to fight me on this claim can do so and lose,
considering the first half of Beneath was Rear Window"
and the last act was a mish-mash of Psycho, Frenzy,
and The Trouble with Harry.)
One of the major complaints is that the characters are not
sketched at all: that they are mere soulless vessels, moving
through the various action and suspense set pieces, devoid of
prior history. This simply isn’t true, and everyone
(right down to the black ski-mask wearing psychopath) are
characterized in intricate ways, including dialogue and
mannerisms. And Foster’s character, a claustrophobic,
suffering mother, is not only a rim-shot off of Jimmy
Stewart’s Scottie from Vertigo, but she is as true a
being as anyone. A fiercely intelligent, strong-willed
single woman living in the dark recesses of a huge metropolitan
city and raising her daughter as best she can. This is who
she is.
Which isn’t to say the movie isn’t a Double Jeopardy-like
female empowerment thing, because it’s not. What the
movie taps into, at its primal level, isn’t about being a man
or a woman. It’s about being a human being, and being a
human being that wants to protect its young from danger, at any
cost.
This was the first movie I had seen in a while with a full
audience, and feeling (not to mention hearing) the crowd rollick
and squirm throughout the duration of the movie was really
special. Everyone was on the edge of their seat, sweaty
palms and all, and that kind of grand audience participation is
the kind of experience missing from most big budget Hollywood
flicks. Every twist and turn of the labyrinthine script
(credited to David Koepp, but undoubtedly assisted by Andrew
Kevin Walker) was mirrored by the twisting and turning of the
crowd. I only wish this audience had been with me last
weekend when watching the newly revamped E.T. Sigh.
What actually makes the movie important, though (and this very
well could be reading into it too much), it the fact that it’s
central theme is that of insecurity. Since September 11th,
no American has really felt safe. We sat on our futons and
watched two buildings get brought down by an unspeakable evil,
and since that fateful day, nothing is of the antiseptic
atmosphere. This film takes place in New York City,
and thrusts every audience member to an extreme feeling of
unease, and it’s a ballsy decision executed expertly by a
master of the game. It’s refreshing and timely, which is
what I love about it.
You may have noticed that I haven’t talked about the suspense
set pieces, and that’s because they’re better left seen, not
talked about. Every sequence unfolds with horror and grace
(two things Fincher juggles masterfully), and since this
doesn’t contain a spoiler warning, I’ll quickly move on…
As you can tell, I loved this movie. It’s sharp, fun,
and scary. And when seeing a movie like Panic Room,
those are all the things you can hope for. You get some
extra stuff (like hallucinogenic camera work and a downbeat
ending), because the keys of the Porsche have been given to
Fincher. The bottom-line being: go get your sundae, and
enjoy every last bite of it.
Rating: 3 out of 4
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