PANIC ROOM (David Fincher, 2002) R

Reviewed: February 10th, 2003

Jodie Foster's Panic Room performance is a bit too studious for my tastes. She does exactly what is required of her -- being perpetually scared -- but nothing more. It is the difference between a good, adequate, genre performance and a great one (Forest Whitaker here, with his sleepy eyes and melancholy reluctance). Now put Nicole Kidman in the lead (she was cast prior to Foster and spent two weeks shooting before an injury forced her to drop out) and watch the fireworks. As David Thomson once wrote, Kidman has a "sheer lust" for the camera; I call it a sort of carnal ferocity and mischievous spontaneity that is rarely equaled in modern cinema. It's one thing to see a pack of criminals face off against a conservative sophisticate. It's quite another -- and far more interesting -- to see them face off against someone who is not afraid to toy with them and taunt them back. Don't get me wrong, the heroine of Panic Room still, of course, must be tentative and fearful. But Kidman's colorful flair is missing (think what she did in The Others, a more complex -- but still essentially the same -- part and you'll understand what I mean). In its stead we have Jared Leto's attempted flavor. Leto can be a fine actor, but in Panic Room he overacts and annoys. Menace is not derived from shrill caricature, it's derived from creepy understatement (Dwight Yoakam understands this). The toying/taunting point is an especially important one because I've always found it odd Foster's character remains on the defensive for almost the entire picture. Since she and her daughter -- not the criminals -- are the ones in a place of inherent security, I'd think she would utilize their privileged position and attempt an occasionally proactive plan of escape (attack). Initially I find it odd she doesn't try and cut a deal with the thieves. She says take what you want and get out, but upon discovering that what they want is in the panic room, she instantly decides that the situation is an unfortunate stalemate, a prognosis I would not be so quickly convinced of. Why doesn't she pursue a further line of questioning, like: "What do you want from here?" "How can I get it?" "I can't? Alright, then leave me the safecracking tools and try and tell me what to do from the intercom in my bedroom." (It can't be that hard; from what we see, Whitaker simply drills, then looks at three dials through a microscope, turning them until their grooves align.) My comments will surely seen like smalltime carping to many, but w/r/t an ostensibly meticulous thriller like Panic Room it is absolutely essentially that every plotting angle is airtight. Another problem: during my whole first viewing I was left wondering why the thieves don't knock out at least the majority of the security cameras [possibly still leaving a few for communicational purposes]). Sure enough, I soon discovered, writer David Koepp knew he had a lapse in logic on his hands but was too lazy to go back and fix the problem proper. (When Foster finally knocks out the cameras herself [once she's outside the Panic Room], Yoakam [now inside the Panic Room] wonders aloud to Whitaker, "Why didn't we do that?") Moreover, who designs a panic room house where the cameras hang from the ceiling in plain sight? Wouldn't it make a hell of a lot more sense to hide them in the walls?" I'd be remiss if I also didn't briefly mention that the movie's pro forma stabs at humor are bothersome and hinder its moment-to-moment ability to unsettle; the continual pop cultural references (Joe Pesci, Elmore Leonard) are particularly stupid.

All my longwinded complaining aside, the negatives barely make a dent in Panic Room's ample, eminently rewatchable armor. This is still an exactingly tense and claustrophobic thriller, one of the few that truly earns its genre's title. It it never less than joyous to behold Fincher's astounding mastery over his medium: he's one of the few directors capable of crafting sequences simultaneously beautiful and hair-raising. After subsequent viewings I still think the movie's subtext free (though I've seen credible analysis that interprets Panic Room as everything from a treatise on class consciousness to an allegory for the way in which advertising is invading our personal spaces; not to discount these efforts, simply to say they fail to stick to me*), but achieving hugely entertaining, popcorn aims is a small miracle in its own right.

*A late-breaking entry and strong contender for sticking: Zach Ralston raises the excellent point that if one watches David Koepp's directorial debut The Trigger Effect (which I'm a fan of, but haven't seen in awhile), in a back-to-back-to-back triple feature with Panic Room and Mission: Impossible, the subtext of modern security being an illusion is inescapable. Zach's probably right, and I gotta program those movies together when I have the time.

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