"Panic Room"

Dour director David Fincher's showy thriller wants to sell pulp as dark, edgy drama -- too bad he misses the dramatic meat.

By Charles Taylor

Mar 29, 2002 | Alfred Hitchcock used to say that whenever he saw one of those standard old-movie shots peering into a living room from the back of a blazing hearth, he'd ask himself, "Who's in the fireplace?"

Hitchcock would have a lot of wondering to do at the tricky vantage points in David Fincher's thriller "Panic Room." Fincher sends his camera into keyholes, through electrical outlets and snaking around air ducts, between the solid barriers that separate one floor of a house from another. These gimmicky effects add nothing in the way of suspense. They're like a kid shouting, "Looky what I can do, Ma!" But the glummest kid imaginable.

For somebody so dedicated to playing around with the camera, Fincher doesn't seem to be having any fun. He doesn't get jazzed up, the way Scorsese does when he's showing off, as in those ridiculous close-ups of balls zooming around a pool table in "The Color of Money." "Panic Room" is a little like watching a demonstration of trick shots by a manic-depressive hustler. Fincher takes no apparent joy in making movies, and he gives none to the audience. The title sequence features the names of the actors and crew appearing as legends on a series of Manhattan skyscrapers, similar to the way the titles appear in the beginning of "North by Northwest." But the low drone of Howard Shore's score warns you Fincher isn't up to anything as frivolous as giving the audience a good time.

Recently, I heard a critic call Fincher's "Seven" the most influential movie of the last few years. I don't think there's any disputing that. Just look at the poster for last year's slasher flick "Jeepers Creepers," or the trailers for Barbet Schroeder's upcoming "Murder by Numbers," and you see the combination of shaky titles, detritus and grime that wouldn't be out of place in a Brothers Quay animation -- gloom illuminated by sudden shock flashes of light that characterized the opening titles of "Seven." And the self-seriousness of that movie, not to mention the go-for-broke grisliness, seems to have permeated Hollywood thrillers, which are now sold less as if they were an enticing, exciting few hours than as if they were an endurance test, punishment waiting to be dished out.

Fincher is drawn to pulp, but part of the critical appeal of his movies is that he treats pulp with a solemnity usually reserved for the art house. That's what makes it possible to hear "Seven" discussed as if it were a serious treatise on (ahem) "The Darkness Within Us All." His sensibility -- which might be called nihilism as graphic design -- seems calculated to get people to swallow what they might otherwise be embarrassed by. Beneath all the batterings and boozing and gutter rot in "Fight Club" lies a message that would be perfectly suited to "Oprah," about the pain of men trying to come to terms with their masculinity and crying out for lost father figures. (Anyone still infatuated with "Fight Club" might try watching it after Sept. 11 and see if they can stomach the finale, where a city falls in a terrorist attack. Of course, Fincher doesn't show us any people being killed. His unpopulated skyscrapers, like the unpopulated suburban homes at the climax of Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point," are the symbols of an empty, prefab culture.)

David Koepp's screenplay for "Panic Room" takes off from a good, serviceable thriller premise. Jodie Foster is a recent divorcee whose ex's moolah allows her to buy a big Upper West Side brownstone. The place is three floors with a working elevator and, off the master bedroom, a panic room -- a steel-lined security vault with a separate phone line, video surveillance monitors and supplies designed to let the occupants survive home invasions or other potential disasters. During her first night in the new place with her teenage daughter (Kristen Stewart), three men who expected to find the house unoccupied enter. Foster and her daughter hole up in the panic room, only to discover that what the men came for is in there with them.

That isn't a bad beginning for a siege movie. But Fincher's grinding sensibility provides no sense of contrast. Would it have been too difficult for him to shoot the brownstone as a dream home, in order to give us the jolt of seeing a safe harbor turned into a trap? When Foster and her daughter tour the place with a pair of real estate agents (one of them played by Ann Magnuson, whose snappy, bitchy repartee provides a little relief), no shaft of sunlight strays into Fincher's meticulously designed dinge. And the cinematographers (Conrad W. Hall and Darius Khondji) frame the women against vast gray spaces so they look lost in the rooms. The place looks like a death trap, and anyone in the audience who's actually seen a movie before is probably shaking their heads in disbelief asking, "They're not going to move in there?" It's like those moments in slasher movies when a character wanders into a dark room or outdoors at night while we wait for them to be turned into tartare. Except that it doesn't have any awareness of its own cheesy obviousness, the thing that can get a horror movie audience laughing at the silliness of the whole setup.

Next Page: Running through Fincher's maze

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