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Whatever else it pretends to be— a Hitchcockian “closed room” experiment in suspense, the story of a newly divorced woman learning to stand up for herself, a classic morality tale of devouring greed— “Panic Room”‘s primary purpose is to depict the kinetic interplay of motion and space. David Fincher’s camera maps out and explores every inch of a Central Park West brownstone using “Alice In Wonderland”-like fluctuations of scale and perspective. The challenge was to make a film that stayed within narrow, finite boundaries: the four walls, so to speak, of a family’s home. Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits” used domestic space in a different way, spinning the monster-in-the-closet fear by putting a time portal in a boy’s bedroom, providing the story with an infinite expansion outward. Fincher has done the opposite. Most directors are capable of limiting the space for the story’s action, but Fincher has gone one further; in “Panic Room” the expansion is almost infinitely inward. It is a film that wittily deconstructs our notions of home, laying bare a microcosmos that was always under our noses. The film is a sort of Gothic romance, a tale of horror centering around a mysterious house but expressed in the humdrum, nuts-and-bolts banalities of the homeowner. Think Edgar Allan Poe directing an episode of “Home Improvement”.
Fincher’s pendulous camera doesn’t just show us what’s happening but brings us in, allows us to inhabit the house. Everything is tangibly three-dimensional, and, as in some scientific demonstration of quantum theory, the world is divided and divided again until our notions of proportion are all askew. What was big before is still big, but what was small keeps getting bigger, too. The opening credits, in which the titles are projected three-dimensionally into various shots of the Manhattan skyline, establishes the visual pattern of the film right from the start. A memorable CG sequence in which the camera swoops through the house as the burglars attempt to enter the brownstone continues the theme, passing into a keyhole, through the handle of a coffeepot, and up through the floorboards. As the film progresses, the spaces become tighter and tighter as the characters are caught up in building drama. The camera moves from the big to the small with sometimes dizzying speed, keeping the audience off balance and rearranging our conception of where we are. The feeling of moving through real spaces is uncanny. An outstanding visual achievement— Fincher is one of the very best stylists we have— “Panic Room” is as close to a 3D film as you’ll get without putting on those silly glasses.
The masterful effacement of structural solidity is an ideal visual motif to combine with a home invasion plot. The terror in “Panic Room”, to the extent that it’s there at all, comes from being trapped inside our own domestic space and consequently forced to reconceptualize the world we had taken for granted. To do so for Meg is also to come to terms with a new life. Jodie Foster is wonderful, creating a sympathetic portrait of a newly single mom testing her sea legs. Watching her uneasiness inside the house transform into stern control over every little element is fascinating. As in “Silence of the Lambs”, Foster strikes the right balance of fear and self-possession. Even as she’s doing what must be done you get a sense that she’s fighting back her own terror and barely winning. At the film’s climax, she must seize control over her own house, and as she makes her rounds, preparing for the finale, she becomes a housewife in reverse, rushing from room to room only to create messes. Actually, these scenes are, in spirit, not dissimilar from the scene in “Kramer Vs. Kramer” in which Dustin Hoffman makes his son a proper breakfast— she is rolling up her sleeves and becoming a mother.
Despite the heart and depth Foster brings to the table, the film suffers because the story is far too arbitrary to sustain any real interest. Screenwriter David Koepp’s challenge, like Fincher’s, was to create suspense out of highly limited material— essentially five characters in one house, and everything happens within a few hours— but the story is a mild stew of minor but cumulatively distracting improbabilities. One detail bobs to the surface after another, pushing the story forward and then disappearing. Nothing that happens is wildly unbelievable, but there’s an unsettling stream of “just-so” events. The story is one of those house-of-cards affairs: if one detail were altered the story would utterly collapse. The burglars break in thinking no one’s living in the house because the lead thief calculated the escrow period using business days rather than real days; Meg connects the security system so that the panic room’s video system works, but conveniently doesn’t hook up the phone; Raul, the ruthless, dyspeptic thief whose role in the story is to turn up the dramatic heat, is just called in for the job that day, for no apparent reason; Meg reaches 911 but is put on hold; a cell phone, the object of a suspenseful sequence, doesn’t work once retrieved; and so on. Such arbitrary details add up to a rather unconvincing chain of circumstances that serves the suspense very poorly.
The fear of immurement in one’s own home by pitiless marauders is ripe for exploration in our culture, in which urban decay is traditionally set against suburban security. Too bad “Panic Room” can’t really tap into that, though, because the house is far too unusual for most people to identify with. In a sense, Fincher and Koepp really haven’t taken on the challenge of making a tightly enclosed suspense film at all, because their location allows for too many spurious plot points. The panic room itself is so unusual it allows for too much improvisation on Koepp’s part. When the burglars want to smoke them out, we suddenly discover there’s an air duct leading to the room. Okay, but as the scene goes on, another duct appears, then another, then a smaller duct opening out into the courtyard below. So how many air ducts are there? Answer: as many as Koepp needed. Films like “Panic Room” rely heavily on the rules their stories establish, but Koepp bends his a little too often. How much more suspenseful would the film have been if the story had taken place in a regular three-story home in some quiet suburb? If the materials at hand were the same materials found in almost any middle-class American home? Fincher should have gotten John Hughes to write the script. “Home Alone”, though a slapstick comedy, has all the domestic ingredients that would have made “Panic Room” a sensationally entertaining thriller. As it is, the universal fear of being locked in your own home by burglars is left mostly untapped by the unrecognizability of the home in question. |
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