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The Panic Room, sometimes known as a Safe Room, is a place of sanctuary in one's home.  It is usually hidden behind a bookcase or paneling and designed to be self-sufficient while one waits to see what the danger on the other side of the wall will do.  A mini-siege, in fact. Medieval times would have the Panic Room encased in stone, (i.e., ye olde castle), modern times has it with three inches of steel like a cage.  Jodie Foster's latest film, The Panic Room, shows what happens when thieves (Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam) try everything but James Bond's travel kit to get what they want from this special room.  The trouble is, Jodie and her daughter (Kirsten Stewart) are inside the room.

The plot has Foster as a newly divorced Mom with diabetic pre-teen daughter.  Jodie buys a large Brownstone townhouse that has a Panic Room.  This particular room is designed to protect occupants from crooks, so has its own telephone line, food, water, ventilation system and security set-up.  The first night in the house, crooks break in.  Not just crooks, mind you, but a relative of the former owner (Leto) who wants something valuable that is hidden in the Panic Room.  Whitaker plays a man who installs these rooms and has a head for inventive ideas, while Dwight Yoakam is the menacing heavy. Bauchau is Jodie's former husband.

The story has just enough twists and turns to keep audiences interested.  Who is going to think of what next and be just one jump ahead of the other guy?  The crooks try to gas the women out.  The doorbell rings. Who is it?  The crooks get into an argument amongst themselves.  Who will prevail?  There are sweeping camera shots that are like a roller-coaster ride through the kitchen, up and down stairs and throughout the Brownstone so that the audience feels as though they are part of the drama.

This was to have been Nicole Kidman's film, but ended up with Jodie Foster at the helm. She plays a determined woman with survival on her mind who under-estimates her daughter's inner strength.  There is a great deal of physical work for Foster who also chased a bad guy in Silence of the Lambs. Whitaker steals his scenes as a crook who blends tender with tenacity in reaching a goal.  Jared Leto is barely recognizable and is the one who masterminds the robbery, but isn't at all sure of himself.  The revelation is Dwight Yoakam as Raoul to whom killing is just another thing to do that day.  This country western singer has matured into a fine actor who does menacing quite well.  Another revelation is young actress Kristen Stewart who plays the daughter as bratty one minute and precocious the next.  Stewart has one clever line in a situation where Jodie and she are trying to send an SOS in Morse code with a flashlight.  Jodie asks, Where did you learn this? Kristen replies, In Titanic.>

The Panic Room shows you how the idle rich handle valuables and themselves by having such a room.  The rest of us take our chances with deadbolt locks, barking dogs and chairs under door handles.  This Brownstone is so spacious that one floor would make a large apartment for someone.  Why a single mother with child would need so much room is not mentioned.  The daughter wears a new type of wrist monitor that charts glucose levels.  The word high-tech does not adequately describe the security system in this place.  It comes with the house should be a red flag that something desirable might be in that place. There are video cameras everywhere and a bank of monitors that resembles something from a television station.  If I were buying a castle with a vat of boiling oil above every gate, I would sort of ask, Why, pray tell, is this needed? 

All in all, The Panic Room does pay off.  You don't know exactly what is coming round the bend, but as in The Time Machine with the time machine eclipsing the actors; the panic room withstands the onslaught of actor talent and remains regal. For protection, it is par excellance'.

Copyright 2002 Marie Asner
Submitted 3/30/02

One of my favorite movie-going experiences happened a few years ago here on the South side. My friend Garth and I had the privilege of accompanying two attractive young women to a screening of Wait Until Dark, the great Audrey Hepburn thriller. Now Garth and I had seen the film before, but our companions had not. And if you've seen it (and what are you waiting for if you haven't?), you'll know that the movie features a jump-out-of-your-seat scary moment. Sure enough, at the appropriate time, our dates literally did jump out of their seats in fright and proceeded to cling to us for the rest of the film. Which confirmed why horror movies are popular with young men hoping to get closer to that special someone.

Unfortunately, Panic Room, a new thriller starring Jodie Foster, doesn't contain any of those moments, and it's interesting to ponder why. It's certainly not for lack of trying. The film opens with Meg Altman (Foster) and her young daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) checking out a potential house on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. This isn't any ordinary house, though. It's an elaborate, if old-fashioned, townhouse that features multiple floors, beautiful woodwork, and one decidedly contemporary touch--a panic room.

Now, for those of us whose gross income doesn't equal that of a small country, a panic room is a hermetically-sealable room with an intricate security system, including television screens that allow the viewer to see what's going on in the rest of the house. Meg doesn't understand the room's appeal, though that will soon change.

Indeed, on the first night after Meg and Sarah move in, their house is broken into by three burglars: Burnham (Forest Whitaker), Junior (Jared Leto), and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam). The three are after a large sum of money that's hidden in the residence, and they're surprised to find it occupied. But a mother and her daughter aren't going to stop them, that is until Meg and Sarah flee into the panic room and close the door. You see, the money is in the panic room. What follows is a desperate game of wits, as the men try to lure and then force the women out, while Meg concocts a plan to escape alive. That Sarah is a diabetic whose blood sugar is dropping by the hour only adds to the tension.

On paper, it sounds like a great idea, and David Fincher (Fight Club, Seven) would seem like a fine choice for director. His command of atmospherics is top-notch, and he has a visual style conducive to the
thriller genre. Furthermore, Jodie Foster and Forest Whitaker are top-notch actors who bring both credibility and sensitivity to even the most generic roles. So why doesn't it succeed like it should?

Part of the problem is the flatness of the script (written by David Koepp, Stir of Echoes). Right from the beginning, the three burglars are presented as the nice-and-regretful one (Burnham), the loose cannon (Junior), and the truly malevolent force of evil (Raoul). Those characterizations never change, so it's no surprise (and therefore devoid of tension) when Burnham and Raoul argue or when Junior starts flipping out. And it doesn't take a detective to know that Burnham might need to have a change of heart if Meg and her daughter are going to get out alive. There's also something fundamentally unexciting about the panic room. There's never much danger that the robbers can get in, so the only thrills come when Meg and Sarah try to get out. Those moments are genuinely suspenseful, but they're few and far between.

The contrast with Wait Until Dark is helpful. In that film, Audrey Hepburn's character (and a young girl) also unwittingly possesses something that three men want, and those three men also vary in their evil intensity. But the early film is brilliant in its pacing. The fact that the men have an intricate plan helps enormously. The audience understands part of that plan, while Hepburn is oblivious. And as we learn more and more, we become more and more nervous for our heroine, which leads to that crushing moment in Wait Until Dark when Audrey Hepburn finally realizes that these men she's let into her house are not her friends. As Hitchcock pointed out, that discrepancy between a character's knowledge and the audience's is the foundation of suspense. Panic Room doesn't use that at all. We know pretty much exactly what Meg knows, and that never changes.

Fincher also makes some unhelpful stylistic decisions. Wait Until Dark used the oncoming darkness to fantastic effect. That movie begins in the bright daylight and slowly gets darker and darker, with the movie's climax taking place in almost total darkness, an extraordinarily effective technique. Panic Room's lighting never changes. It's dark and dreary from the outset. But since we're used to that from early on, it doesn't function as a sign of suspense; rather it's almost something we get used to, so that the climax is drained of its lighting possibilities. It also leads to a bizarre plot development when Jodie Foster's character goes around unscrewing the lights in her house, just as Audrey Hepburn did. But since those lights were never on in Panic Room, it has no effect whatsoever.

It's not always fair to compare a contemporary film to a classic of its genre, but Panic Room is clearly a homage to Wait Until Dark. The plot similarities are numerous, and the significant number of shot-for-shot duplications can't be accidental. So it's disappointing that Panic Room resorts to actual blood and violence, when Wait Until Dark relied only on their possibility.

Nonetheless, I should back up and say that Panic Room isn't that bad. Foster and Whitaker both give their usual strong performances, and newcomer Stewart is surprisingly effective (surprising because it's a demanding role, and she pulls it off). And while I don't agree with many of Fincher's decisions, the guy does know how to construct a tracking shot and edit a scene. Besides, the material, while not up to the level of Wait Until Dark, still has enough excitement to keep most audience members awake. Just don't
expect to be scared seatless.   

J. Robert Parks 4/2/2002