Film Of The Week - Phone Booth
The Sunday Age
Sunday May 25, 2003
Director Joel Schumacher
Writer Larry Cohen
Cast Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland, Forest Whitaker, Radha Mitchell, Katie Holmes
Rating M
Running time 80 minutes
****
In real life, the telephone has its uses. But, generally speaking, it's a nuisance, especially for the recipient of a call. The only time the bloody thing rings is when you're busy doing something else. However, that's not the case in movies (unless one falls victim to those sociopaths who don't switch off their mobiles at the cinema). On the big screen, phones are usually just part of the decor, seen but not heard, except when it's important. Very important.
Sometimes they help people. In Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), directed by Anatole Litvak, a conversation on a crossed line alerts invalided wife Barbara Stanwyck to the fact that her husband is trying to kill her. In the Rock Hudson-Doris Day sex comedy Pillow Talk (1959), a party line brings the couple together. In Sydney Pollack's The Slender Thread (1965), a telephone provides the tenuous link between a woman who's taken an overdose (Anne Bancroft) and the help-line volunteer (Sidney Poitier) trying to locate her whereabouts. In The Truth About Cats and Dogs (1996), the phone becomes the means by which Janeane Garofalo is able to maintain the pretence to Ben Chaplin that she looks like Uma Thurman.
Sometimes, though, phones get people into trouble. In Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954), Ray Milland's plan to get rid of his wife (Grace Kelly) hinges on her answering its summons at a particular time. Phone calls terrorise teenage girls in When A Stranger Calls (1979), Scream (1996), and many other films. Anyone foolish enough to even answer the phone in The Ring (1998/2002), faces a death sentence. And in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (2002), a phone-sex call gets befuddled Adam Sandler into trouble big.
Shot in late 2000 for a pittance ($US1.3 million plus advertising costs), Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth is a phone movie par excellence: suspenseful, smartly written and economically directed. Like those other rare edge-of-the-seat gems that turn up every so often - such as Duel (1971), The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974), The Hitcher (1986) and Breakdown (1997) - it's a gripping, no-nonsense thriller, and the pace never lets up.
In the opening sequences, it becomes clear that publicist Stu Shepard (Colin Farrell) regards the phone as a friend, an accomplice, a prop and even a weapon in the duplicitous games he plays with all and sundry. Pounding his beat along Broadway as if he's Manhattan's Mr Big, his apprentice (Keith Nobbs) rushing along in his wake, hanging on his every word, Stu spins the good spin on his cell-phone.
Insert shots of those on the other end of the line reveal that he's a master manipulator. When a restaurateur rushes on to the street to remind him of a promise not kept, the phone becomes part of the performance Stu produces by way of a response. Wearing his three-day stubble like a disguise, he's a fast talker, a silver-tongued liar, a conman, a charlatan. Nobody should believe him, but somehow they do.
He's heading for a particular phone booth. It's on 53rd Street, between Broadway and 8th, and is, as the narrator tells us, "the last one of its kind". Stu uses it every day to call Pam (Katie Holmes), the aspiring young actress he's currently wooing with his lies. He uses it rather than his cell phone because he doesn't want his loyal wife, Kelly (Melbourne actress Radha Mitchell), to find Pam's number on his phone records.
Soon after he finishes his call to Pam - who's commendably resistant to his advances - the phone in the booth rings. Rather than walking away, he picks it up. The caller on the other end (it's Kiefer Sutherland) is to become the voice inside Stu's head for the next hour or so. And its function is not unlike the one assumed by Robin Williams' voice over the phone to Al Pacino in Christopher Nolan's Insomnia (2002).
"I know what you've done," it says, before embarking on a litany of his deceptions. "You are guilty of inhumanity to your fellow man," it accuses. "You have committed the sin of spin," it adeptly alliterates. The power balance has suddenly shifted. Stu is now on the receiving end.
He goes to hang up, but is quickly convinced that he shouldn't. "Stu, if you hang up, I will kill you." The caller not only seems able to see inside Stu's soul, but he also has a high-powered rifle trained on his prey. The voice inside Stu's head, reminding him of his guilt, is standing-in for his previously silenced conscience.
Phone booths have played roles in films before. Tippi Hedren fled into one in Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) as the small seaside town of Bodega Bay exploded in flames around her; Clark Kent made use of them as changing-rooms in Superman (1978). But this one becomes what the film's writer Larry Cohen (the maverick king of the American B-movie during the 1970s) calls "a glass coffin".
Stu has been thrust into the middle of a nightmare and he can't wake up. He's on his home turf, but he's lost control. The phone has betrayed him. New York City is walking right past the door, totally oblivious to his plight. There seems to be no way out and Schumacher's film pulls the noose tighter and tighter.
Secondary characters move fluidly in and out of the firing line. The apprentice, the women in Stu's life, a trio of hookers on whose territory he has trespassed, the cop (Forest Whitaker) who arrives on the scene, tries to make sense of what is happening, and comes to recognise something of his own traumas in what's happening to Stu.
The film's route to the screen has been a long and winding one. Apparently, Cohen took the concept to Alfred Hitchcock in the '60s, to no avail. Neither was able to solve the problem of what might keep the man in the booth. In a recent interview, Schumacher outlined the original idea: "The script was actually about middle-aged people. The characters were wonderful, but very Damon Runyonesque. Stu was kind of a Broadway Danny Rose character (and) the Katie Holmes character was this gum-popping, brassy manicurist."
Then a number of actors attached to the project came and went, including Will Smith (who left to make Ali) and Jim Carrey. The film's release was delayed after September 11. "It would have been inappropriate to put a movie out about Manhattan, especially a movie with dark humour," Schumacher says. And then the next release date of November 2002 was postponed when the film's events were seen to have too much in common with the activities of the Washington sniper(s).
It has been worth the wait.
© 2003 The Sunday Age
