"Panic"

William H. Macy's hit man commands a serious black comedy, a quiet thriller that's also an evocation of middle-aged disappointment.

By Charles Taylor

Jan 19, 2001 | For a film titled "Panic," the feature debut from writer-director Henry Bromell is strikingly calm. The state it evokes is one of drowning by increments in familiar surroundings that have gradually become intolerable. It's about life as a prolonged anxiety attack, where getting through the next hour, even getting your next easy breath, seems nearly impossible. There has never been an evocation of middle-aged disappointment like it.

Unfortunately, the story of how "Panic" almost didn't get released is all too familiar. It's worth repeating if only to illustrate the way independent companies are increasingly aping the practices of the big studios. After seeing "Panic" last year, Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter did some digging. He reported that after acquiring the film, Artisan Entertainment promptly sold it to HBO to show on cable. Hunter noted how strange it was for a company that had successfully marketed non-niche pictures like "The Blair Witch Project," Jim Jarmusch's "Ghost Dog" and Darren Aronofsky's "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream" to give up so easily on a movie that was hard to categorize. But that's apparently just what Artisan did after one test screening with a mostly teenage audience in a Los Angeles mall.

Hunter quotes the film's producer, Andrew Lazar, saying, "The test screening was a ruse." In other words, Artisan ensured a negative reaction from an audience it knew would not respond to the film to "prove" its hunch that the movie had no audience appeal. When an independent company behaves like that, it ceases to be any different from the big studios. Luckily for "Panic," and for the audiences who will get to see it in theaters around the country, a real independent, San Francisco's Roxie Releasing (which performed a similar rescue mission a few years ago with Matthew Bright's "Freeway"), managed to acquire it. "Panic" is a small movie, to be sure, but it's also a thoroughly original one.

Even some of the critics who have come out for it don't quite seem to know how to classify it. It's being called a black comedy, maybe because the premise -- middle-aged hit man (William H. Macy) consults shrink (John Ritter) about midlife crisis -- is familiar from "The Sopranos" and "Analyze This." But despite the movie's wry humor, the extreme situation is played straight, as a pained examination of the conflict between fathers and sons.

In "Panic" the domineering father who feels it's his duty to teach his weak son how to get along in the world is a literal proponent of "kill or be killed." Macy's Alex leads what looks like an ordinary middle-class life, running a mail-order business out of his home. But not even his wife, Martha (Tracey Ullman), knows that he makes his real money carrying out the hits that his father, Michael (Donald Sutherland), has contracted, a job he has been trained to do since boyhood -- and trained not to talk about. That's the vow Alex breaks when, disgusted and unable to stand up to his father, he goes to see a psychologist. And things get even worse for poor Alex when his father hands him his latest assignment: the shrink.

There's an imaginative logic at work in casting Sutherland and Macy as father and son. It's not that they look alike, but something in their long, unusual faces suggests a family connection. And when Sutherland, with his tall frame, is placed next to the somewhat diminutive Macy, Bromell uses the discrepancy in their stature to get at the hold Michael has over his son. It's a poisonous relationship, which Bromell suggests in all sorts of subtle ways -- in the way Sutherland orders for his son when they lunch together and even in the restaurants where they have business meetings, places with red leather banquettes that look as if neither the décor nor the wait staff has changed in 50 years. It's exactly the opposite of the relationship Alex has with his own son, Sammy, an inquisitive, intelligent boy played with an almost preternatural perceptiveness by David Dorfman. The scenes between Macy and Dorfman are relaxed little duets in which Alex is amused and delighted by his son's unexpected questions. ("Dad, what's infinity?")

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