director
David Fincher
screenwriter
David Koepp
producers
Ceán Chaffin
Judy Hofflund
David Koepp
Gavin Polone
cinematographers
Conrad W. Hall
Darius Khondji
music
Howard Shore
editors
James Haygood
Angus Wall
cast
Jodie Foster (Meg Altman)
Kristen Stewart (Sarah Altman)
Forest Whitaker (Burnham)
Jared Leto (Junior)
Dwight Yoakam (Raoul)
Patrick Bauchau (Stephen Altman)
Ian Buchanan (Evan)
Ann Magnuson (Lydia)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 108m
u.s.
release: March 29,
2002
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other david
fincher films
reviewed on this website:
- fight
club
- seven
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Technology is the star of Panic
Room, in front of the camera and behind it. The action centers
on an impenetrable chamber in an expensive brownstone, a room
designed to withstand the most sophisticated and persistent home
invaders. There's one thing it can't hold off, though: David
Fincher's camera. This director, who showed a flair for ominous,
oppressive mood in Alien 3, Seven,
and The Game, now treats the frame as his panting, frisky
puppy. With the aid of computer animation, the camera rockets
into keyholes, vents, even right through the handle of a coffee
pot. I appreciate Fincher's desire to keep a claustrophobic movie
visually interesting, but all it does is scream "This is
a movie -- would you all please look at how much of a movie
this is."
Jodie Foster moves into the
aforementioned brownstone with her teenage daughter (Kristen
Stewart, realistically deadpan and unimpressed by anything).
They're shown the "panic room" before they move in;
the idea of it gives Foster the creeps. (This leads to the movie's
almost-lonely note of wit: Nursing buried-alive fears inside
the panic room, Foster mutters "Ever read any Poe?"
"No," says friend Ann Magnuson -- who really should
be getting more work -- "but I loved her last album.")
Naturally, Foster doesn't think to stock the panic room with
supplies (say, food or insulin for her diabetic daughter) or
hook up the room's independent phone line before moving
in; naturally, a trio of thieves pick the duo's first night in
the house to break into it, in search of a safe containing rumored
millions; naturally, said safe is inside the panic room.
Give screenwriter David Koepp
some credit: He manages to keep this impasse plot -- Foster and
daughter, having taken refuge in the panic room, can't get out;
the thieves can't get in -- going for a while solely on tension.
At certain points it's as if Sam Neill and the two children from
Jurassic
Park (which Koepp adapted) hid up in that tree from raptors
for two hours, except that these human raptors are considerably
less toothsome. The ringleader is big, cuddly Forest Whitaker,
who really shouldn't be asked to play an imposing villain straight
(that he was cast -- brilliantly -- as the lethal, virtuosic
samurai in Ghost
Dog was part of that movie's joke); to be fair, though,
he's the one with a conscience, the thief who just wants to get
the money without excess bloodshed. His partners, the jittery
Junior (Jared Leto, amusing when he's being bashed around) and
the stone psycho Raoul (Dwight Yoakam, working his razorblade
monotone to good effect), are less concerned with the welfare
of their captives -- and, fortunately, much less smart than any
person onscreen, and only slightly less smart than many pieces
of furniture onscreen.
You can judge, with a sigh,
why Foster was attracted to this material (other than a residual
urge to work with David Fincher, in whose The Game she
was slated to play the Sean Penn role before dropping out due
to pregnancy). She gets to play fierce protector -- Clarice Starling
as a mama, saving those lambs (or at least one) all over again.
She doesn't do a great deal we haven't seen from her before,
and it comes as absolutely no shock that she's self-sufficient
and resourceful enough to hold the villains at bay while keeping
her daughter safe. The movie is a mere exercise for Foster, her
proof that she can do pared-down mainstream stuff as well as
anyone. We knew that. She can do pretty much anything
as well as anyone. What I'd like to see from her, every decade
or so, is a character with some flaws -- maybe even, gasp, a
villain. A woman as smart and formidable as Foster projects
herself to be could play a female monster to reckon with, but
where's the screenwriter ready to write such a role?
And where's David Fincher's
head these days? Whooshing through keyholes and coffee pots,
I guess. Fincher, it's clear by now, is a slickster in the Ridley
Scott mold; few directors lay on the shadows and bass reverb
as skillfully as he, but after five films, what does he have
to say? From the evidence, possibly that any person with the
ill luck to be trapped in a David Fincher design had better prepare
to bloody himself or herself on the long way out of it. Panic
Room can be taken as a deeply sick and depressing joke on
Fincher's own predicament -- his style is his panic room, and
whether he ever breaks out depends on how richly he's rewarded
for staying inside it.
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