By Henry Bromell, 2000.
Starring Barbara Bain, Neve Campbell, David Dorfman, William H. Macy, John Ritter, Donald Sutherland, Tracey Ullman.
Rating: 7/10, 6.5/10.
I saw this movie because I’d been told that it was the best thing ever. I should have known from the title that it wouldn’t quite reach those heights. According to the internet movie database, there was a movie called Panic in 2001, 2000, 1999, 1997, 1976, 1946, 1965, 1960, 1953, and 1914. As far as the title goes, originality has not yet appeared.
But that’s a silly thing for me to even mention. And the problem with Panic is not a lack of originality. In fact, it’s got a lot of it. The problem is that director and writer Bromell did not push his creativity far enough, and that he chickened out as far as commerciality goes, in that he made it too commercial, when it didn’t want to be.
I’ll get to that later. I want to talk about what was good first.
The acting. When I picked up the movie, I noticed and got excited about William H. Macy and Donald Sutherland and Tracey Ullman. They’re all great, all the time. But then I was like, eh? John Ritter? Neve Campbell, for god’s sake? It turned out, though, that even John and Neve were great in their roles, especially Neve. Who’d-a thunk it? Not me. But it’s true, the two of them, at least here, are on a level with the rest of the cast, which really shocked me. And it was even a movie that required a very delicate touch, as far as the actors go. Given the wrong acting style, the movie could have gone way over the top very easily, considering its subject matter. But it didn’t.
The story, too, is great. It’s about a hitman named Alex (Macy) who got into the business through his father Michael (Sutherland), but now is having a kind of mid-life crisis and wants out. He goes into therapy and tells his at first incredulous therapist Josh (Ritter) everything. Michael doesn’t want Alex in therapy, so he pretends that someone has hired him to kill Josh. Alex, of course, is torn between family obligation and his newfound morality. Additionally, he’s in a stagnant marriage with Martha (Ullman), who is not an unpleasant woman so much as one with whom Alex just no longer connects with. So when he meets an apparently interested younger woman, Sarah (Campbell), in the therapist’s waiting room, he begins to consider an affair. On top of all this, there’s Alex’s beloved and precocious son, Sammy (Dorfman), whom Alex tries, with varying amounts of success, to keep away from the influence of his grandfather. What’s great is that each of these other characters (besides Sammy, who’s too young) has their own life, their own needs, their own self-justifications. We see Michael and his wife Deidre (Bain), still very much in love. Martha has a history and feelings beyond the usual cheated-upon wife. And Sarah is not just the woman Alex can have an affair with or not depending on his fancy; she damn well has a say in it, too.
The movie looks great, too. It’s all in very sharp, high contrast focus, with a color palette that tends towards the blue. Set design and art direction is great, and whatever building they had the therapist’s office in...well, damn, it’s cool.
All in all, though, Panic seemed to be trying really hard to be the next American Beauty—that is, the next arty but commercial enough to be popular movie. Aside from the question of whether this is a good ambition or not, Panic just tries too hard, and fails. American Beauty succeeded (at its arty/commercial ambitions; whether it succeeded as a movie is another question entirely), I think, because it combined the artiness and the commerciality. That is, its artistic values went hand in hand with its ambitions of popularity, not against them. Here, though, it is a struggle; Panic wants to be an art film and it wants to be a mainstream success, but the two wants are not integrated. We’ll get a long stretch of arty goodness (say, the scenes where Alex is trailing Josh), and then we’ll get a concentrated chunk of "this is to rake in the Sacajaweas" (the completely unnecessary scenes with Sarah at the nightclub, which seem to be there just to lure in the "I like to see beautiful young people enjoying themselves in that crazy way the kids do it these days" audience, both young and old). I like arty movies and I like trashy commercial ones, I do. But for one thing, Panic goes in for both in the extreme, and arty can handle its extreme form a lot better than trashy commercial can, and for another thing, the two just do not rest comfortably together.
It all culminates in the crappy final scenes, which I will not reveal, but I will say this. One: the slow motion and lingering shots are very, very cheesy. Two: the dialogue is very, very cheesy. Three: the meeting of the characters who had never met and what they have to say to one another, not knowing who each other are, is very, very cheesy. Four: the actual dialogue writing in these scenes is very, very cheesy. Five: it all left me with the feeling that Panic was very, very cheesy.