The Game, Panic Room
A Fincher double feature!
David Fincher brings weight, substance and excitement to outlandish concepts and genre exercises through superb photography and astonishing production values. Both of these films are so well shot and appointed they take the breath away.
I wish David Fincher would make more movies. I wish David Fincher would shoot something I wrote. Hint hint.
Fincher has done so well with his smooth, polished, glossy entertainments, I can’t wait to see what he does with a “real drama” someday.
When I was a young man, I hated Michael Douglas. I didn’t like his hair, I didn’t like his chin, I didn’t like his young, self-righteous, more-liberal-than-thou attitude. Then, in 1987, he delivered back-to-back amazing performances as conflicted, guilty, deplorable jerks in Fatal Attraction and Wall Street, and suddenly I was a huge fan. I’ve seen everything he’s done since. I enjoyed some, like A Perfect Murder, and didn’t enjoy others, like Disclosure, but he’s never been less than interesting and enjoyable ever since. Come to think of it, I can’t think of another actor that does what Michael Douglas does these days, playing multifaceted, sometimes unpleasant middle-aged men, and somehow finding decent scripts that feature lead roles for him.
The Game is so absurdly far-fetched in concept and outlandish in its execution that it’s flatly ridiculous, and yet I’ve seen the movie three times and will probably watch it again before my time here on earth is up, partly to watch the performances, partly to study Fincher’s seamless direction, partly to luxuriate in the sumptuous production design.
Panic Room is as contained as The Game is expansive, both in concept and in physicality. Almost a filmed play, it would make a kickass double feature with Woody Allen’s September, but it shares more in common with an old chestnut like Wait Until Dark. And for once, one can mention an Audrey Hepburn movie without apology, for in Panic Room we have an actress more than able to stand up in comparison.
Check out the special effects in Panic Room. It’s not just the flashy shots of the camera floating through the floorboards and zooming through the keyholes. All through the picture, in shot after shot, special effects are used to emphasize and delineate, to clarify and set in relief. A door opens, a phone slides under a bed, a flashlight turns on, the most common of shots, shots that might even be shot by a second unit on most pictures, are here given full CGI treatment, weaving the effects into so many shots that you don’t see them after a while. It’s a whole new approach to effects, using them to heighten and deepen what might otherwise be a claustrophobic chamber-piece.
Jodie Foster, I know, I’ve applauded before. But she’s completely convincing in this part and quite staggeringly well-photographed. Whoever did her hair and makeup in this picture should have been nominated for an Oscar. Seeing her with her teenage daughter, it made me wish that she had done the remake of Freaky Friday instead of Jamie Lee Curtis. It’s not too late!
Most of the acting in the movie is done on a completely believable, naturalistic plane, but then there are a handful of performances that are broader and seem somehow stagebound, as if this really was a filmed play. Both Ann Magnuson and Ian Buchannan as a pair of realtors come off as arch and stylized, and Jared Leto’s performance occasionally makes it seem like he’s doing a very good impression of John C. McGinley. There are plenty of scenes where Forest Whitaker stands there with his great, sad face and stares at Leto as he shouts and waves his arms, and I found myself thinking “I know, I know, I’m with you.”
The direction is done with much grace, elegance and poise, but the script sets a very high bar for itself and occasionally misses the jump.
The bar the script sets is: let’s make a movie, a suspense thriller, a “woman in jeopardy” picture (or “womjep”) about a woman trapped in a tiny room, and see if we can pull that off.
The problem is, you get the woman and her daughter into the room on page 20, and then what happens? The woman and the daughter are in the room and the bad men want very badly to get into the room. The bad men try something and the woman foils them. Then the woman tries something and the bad men foil her. Then the woman goes out of the room to fetch her phone. Then one of the men gets killed by another one of the men. And after each of these events, the central conceit returns to the status quo; the woman is in the room and the bad men want to get in. The situation doesn’t allow for an escalation of tension.
The individual sections of the movie are well written and executed and the film had no trouble sustaining my interest on a second viewing, but the writer (David Koepp) has literally written himself into a box. He has to pull out the old “diabetic kid” routine to get the movie out of its second act and into its third, where the situation is reversed and the bad men are in the room and the woman wants very badly to get in.
Anyway, small complaint for a movie as inventive and elegant as this.
David Koepp, I should probably mention, is something of a touchstone in my household. I use his name all the time, usually in the sentence “I wonder if David Koepp has to do this?” when a studio wants me to pay my own hotel bill, or submit multiple free treatments, or perform multiple pitches over a period of months before telling me that they don’t actually own the rights to a project.
