Panic Room

By Johnny DiLoretto

Johnny DiLoretto is a film critic for Columbus, Ohio's The Other Paper

A blind Audrey Hepburn survived a horrifying Alan Arkin in Wait Until Dark. Sigourney Weaver battled a phallocephalic entity in the bowels of a spaceship in Alien. Catherine Deneuve, a hauntingly beautiful bundle of nerves, took on her own neurotic projections in Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Certainly, there has been a long suspense movie tradition of cloistered women trapped and terrorized by intruders. Jodie Foster presently carries the torch in David Fincher's Panic Room and who better to take on such a claustrophobic challenge than the woman who negotiated the cavernous depravity of Hannibal Lecter's mind in Silence of the Lambs? I can't think of a female star I'd rather see outsmart and trounce a trio of unwanted thugs.

Fincher, the style maven behind Seven and Fight Club, puts Foster through her paces in this murkily handsome but predictable thriller with nothing more on its mind except preening camera acrobatics. Foster's real opponent here is her director, who poses a greater threat to her onscreen existence than the three menacing burglars who break into her five-story New York City townhouse.

Foster plays Meg Altman, a single mother scouting out new domiciles for her and her diabetic daughter on the Upper West Side. Naturally since it's Jodie Foster and not some helium-headed trollop like Angelina Jolie, one assumes her character is a publishing magnate or some other top-shelf mover and shaker to afford the wantonly obscene digs on which she finally settles. Not so. Meg is a recent divorcee and the exorbitant tab is on her pharmaceutical tycoon ex. It's a minor point, a matter of exposition really, but it's the kind of offhanded detail that accumulates in the film that robs Foster of her usual onscreen dignity, a dignity she has carefully cultivated as a major star. Just so the audience doesn't entirely write Meg off as an ex-trophy wife, she lets drop her plans to return to Columbia for a master's degree.

Perhaps the above is the script's attempt to establish a weakness (in this case a dependency on male affluence and power) in the character, but whatever shred of respect one holds for the character at the outset of the movie is lost when we finally see the ex-husband and he's a 60 year-old, long-haired European sporting an unrecognizable, all-purpose accent.

The panic room of the title is a plot-propelling townhouse extra adjoining the master bedroom. This all-the-rage-in-realty feature, apparently installed by the agoraphobic previous owner, comes complete with a wall of Sony surveillance monitors, first-aid kits, a fridge full of snacks, and a stainless steel toilet. Meg and her daughter make a beeline for the safe haven and hole up there when sympathetic Forrest Whitaker, cloyingly miscast Jared Leto, and a third, ski-masked man (the casting is an intended, but disappointing, surprise) break in to plunder a safe that just happens to be situated in said panic room. Foster and fille spend the better part of the movie fending off the menacing freebooters from within.

Slowly, Foster builds a human foundation under this nothing premise, but Fincher relentlessly, maddeningly negates her efforts. Once the audience kindly endorses the premise - that there is only a panic room in the house so Meg will buy it and someone can break in and she can hide in it - Fincher lets too much oxygen into the room. We know within seconds of the intrusion, thanks to a too-telling close-up of teddy-bear Whitaker, that this thief-with-a-heart won't let anything too terrible befall the distressed residents, yet another subtle (and in the film's finale not-so subtle) compromise of Foster's autonomy.

This kind of directorial ineptitude Foster, on sheer screen presence alone, can contend with. It's Fincher's obsessive preoccupation with ostentatious camerawork that chloroforms her and contradicts the film's thematic concerns, beginning with the credit sequence. Here, the names of the cast and crew are decked out in a stately three-dimensional font that reaches back along the facades of New York's townhouses and recedes back into the city's streets. Unlike the interplay of crisscrossing lines in Saul Bass's title sequence for Hitchcock's North by Northwest, which presage that film's endless, dizzying cross country chase, Fincher's titles have everything to do with depth of space and movement and nothing at all to do with entrapment.

Inside the house the director moves his camera through walls and ceilings (with the aid of a three-dimensional computer blueprint) again creating a sense of movement that undermines the claustrophobic suspense he's trying to establish and that his film utterly depends on to evoke a visual sense of peril. At one point, via a tracking shot that moves from the upstairs down, Fincher passes the camera first through the stair's balusters, eventually threading it through the handle of a coffee pot. Later, he burrows his lens into the bulb of a flashlight so we can see the little wires get hot.

One critic pointed out the redundancy of such tactics citing the similar stunts of Orson Welles and Hitchcock. Those masters, he pointed out, constructed sets to allow the actual camera to physically move through or over some obstacle, but here, since we all know that a movie camera cannot fit through the space between a carafe and its handle we assume the effect was achieved in a computer where all such effects are programmed and administered. Quite simply, computers, when used thusly (see the T-Rex sequence in Jurassic Park for the proper way to wed CGI with live-action), cold-bloodedly suck the mystery out of moviemaking.

More insidious still are the spectatorial ramifications. By reducing the spectator's field of vision to a matrix of ones and zeroes, and thereby effectively quashing any human perspective, the spectator is surreptitiously divorced from the action. If one occupies an inhuman spectatorial vantage point with regards to cinematic space, then how can one identify with a character's anxiety that has everything to do with their occupation of that space?

Fincher has yet to fulfill the promise he showed early in his career. His every movie is a house-of-mirrors bauble: hefty, pretty, and vacuous. The only thing his work augurs now, given his illusory dramatic preoccupations, is the continuing erosion of the camera by digital simulacra. What we're left with is not a suspense movie at all, but the facsimile of one.