It’s your call, Colin
PHONE BOOTH ****
DIRECTED BY Joel Schumacher
STARRING Colin Farrell, Forest Whitaker, Radha Mitchell, Katie Holmes
US 2002 80 mins.
BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE **
DIRECTED BY Adam Shankman
STARRING Steve Martin, Queen Latifah, Eugene Levy, Jean Smart
US 2003 104 mins.
By Preston Wilder
“WHO DO You Think You Are?” asks a sign in a shop window near the end of Phone Booth – both a question and a challenge, indirectly aimed at the film’s narcissistic hero. Who does he think he is, this arrogant publicity agent, swanning through Manhattan fobbing showbiz clients off with empty promises, not to mention flitting between wife and girlfriend? But also, more literally, who does he think he is? How does he see himself when he looks within? Does he even bother?
Phone Booth is the story of a day when he’s forced to bother, taken on a moral journey by a psycho with a conscience. It’s no masterpiece but a first-rate ‘B’ movie, photographed in hard, pushed-up colours by Matthew Libatique (who also shot Requiem For a Dream), featuring a fast-talking performance by flavour-of-the-month Colin Farrell. Its small, compact quality is a pleasure in itself: in these days of Hollywood bloat – with even brain-dead fare like the new Lara Croft movie clocking in at 2 hours, 10 minutes – finding an 80-minute thriller is cause for rejoicing.
Oddly, the film is directed by Joel Schumacher (of Batman and Robin, among other aesthetic crimes), who used to specialise in precisely that Lara Croft kind of meaningless gigantism – and seems to be winking at his past reputation by starting the movie in outer space (!) then zooming in further and further till he finds our setting, a rundown corner of New York. The film plays with notions of confinement (a phone booth being a notoriously confined space), with split-screen and frames within the frame, keeping characters in their little spaces – yet the joke, thematically speaking, is that Farrell’s character starts off perfectly confined, everything in his life sorted out and compartmentalised, and ends up unravelled, opened up and able to see himself for the first time.
The set-up is priceless, a high-concept plot worthy of a Twilight Zone episode or writer Larry Cohen’s own offbeat thrillers (like The Stuff, about an ice cream that kills people!). Farrell’s in a phone booth when the phone rings; he picks it up to hear a voice telling him there’s a rifle trained on him from a nearby building, and he’ll be shot if he hangs up or tries to leave the booth. The film takes place in real time (another kind of confinement), as silver-tongued Farrell, who schmoozes for a living, tries to talk his way out of this mess. The sniper, it turns out, is a Voice of Conscience, punishing our hero ‘for his own good’ – but the moralism is surely just a lark, a genre staple from Old Hollywood days when amoral charmers were allowed to entertain us as long as they reformed by the end (the prototype may well be Tony Curtis, as another sleazy publicist in the 1957 Sweet Smell of Success).
Phone Booth had some bad luck, distribution-wise: made over a year ago (I saw it last September at the Toronto Film Festival), it was due to be released last autumn but had to be postponed when the Washington D.C. sniper hit the headlines. Maybe that explains its low profile – but don’t be fooled: you’ll be hard-pressed to find a smarter film at the multiplex between now and December.
Bringing Down The House should’ve been postponed as well; every time a hate-crime is committed, or someone hurls a racist insult, they should postpone this jaw-dropping ‘comedy’ a little more. Instead it became one of the year’s biggest hits ($130 million and counting) in the US – which is rather odd when you consider this is the same country where black college students get affirmative-action programmes and a local councilman almost lost his job for using the word “niggardly”. Political correctness is despicable, but you look at something like Bringing Down the House and think: this can’t be right.
The catch, I guess, is that black people get a ‘positive’ self-image here, so no-one can complain (though it was also considered ‘positive’ when they said “Yessuh” and danced like children in films of the 1930s). Queen Latifah is the resident black person, and she’s extrovert and bubbly – “natural black”, as she puts it. Steve Martin, on the other hand (a.k.a. the white person) is uptight and buttoned-down, “so sterile, so bland”. She loosens him up a little, and even teaches him how to dance: “You can’t dance from your brain!” she cries, though of course not for a moment is the film suggesting that black people do best when no brainwork is involved. Oh no.
I can just about see why this film became a hit: it’s a lively comedy with two uproarious set-pieces – a catfight that turns into a martial arts showdown and a climax in a rough ghetto bar – and fair performances from Martin and Latifah (plus the ubiquitous Eugene Levy as Martin’s kinky colleague). But the stuff in between is lazy, pernicious or both.
Martin is a lawyer who meets Latifah over the Internet, thinking she too is a white lawyer – only to find, after he invites her to dinner, that she’s actually an escaped con looking to clear her name. But why don’t they end up together at the end (he returns to his wife, she goes off with comic-relief Levy)? And why, for instance, must he pass her off as a nanny to his country-club friends, instead of saying ‘Oh, she’s just a client’? Never mind the practical plot point – that calling her a nanny means she has to stay on, when the idea is to get rid of her – does the film think it’d be too absurd for a high-class white lawyer to claim he has a black client? It’s all a bit worrying.
Then again, it’s no skin off local viewers’ noses if the US has a race-relations problem; all we want to know is, is it funny? (The film, not the race-relations problem.) But the trouble with Bringing Down the House is that almost every joke depends on skin colour, whether it’s Latifah having to put on a maid’s uniform or Martin and Levy doing their best to talk ’hood. The film isn’t well-plotted, or convincing at more than sitcom level; it only really makes sense in the context of white America’s current infatuation with black culture, a reminder that rap music in the US is as mainstream as dance music in the UK – though also a reminder that the most popular rapper (Eminem) is a white man.
Bringing Down the House seems to be doing quite well in Cyprus, though it’ll doubtless be shoved aside by Lara Croft and next week’s opening of Terminator 3 (I won’t be around for that one, heading once again to Toronto for this year’s Festival). Maybe I’m being over-sensitive, but it’s strange to see all these people – who, presumably, wouldn’t describe themselves as racists in real life – drawn to a film that depends so heavily on racial stereotypes. I’d half-like to line them up and blare out the message from Phone Booth, exhorting all these fans to look within: “Who Do You Think You Are?”
