Viking Night: Phone Booth
By Bruce Hall
November 10, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com

The True Detective season two reviews are tearing him up inside.
Phone Booth is almost as much of an anachronism as its namesake. It’s an old enough film that it spends most of its first five minutes reminding us how ubiquitous cell phones are becoming, and what a novelty it is to still see a phone booth in regular operation outside a science fiction film or a particularly unimaginative Grand Theft Auto mission. On the other hand, Phone Booth is recent enough to still stand out as that rare, high concept story that takes place almost entirely in one location, relying almost entirely on the power of ideas to create and sustain tension. Not only is that hard to do, it’s hard to do well, and that’s why on almost every level, no matter what your expectations were going in, Phone Booth will more than likely exceed them.

Claustrophobic stories quite often turn out to be morality plays, and this one does not buck that tradition. A young Colin Farrell plays Stu Shepard, a sleazy New York publicist who’s just as at home on the red carpet as he is trawling the streets for celebrity dirt, all in the name of making a buck and getting his own name in the papers. As hard as it is to believe a guy like this is married, he is. But don’t worry - true to character, he’s been carrying on an affair with someone named Pam (Katie Holmes), setting up each liaison through a pay phone, to avoid pulling a Tiger Woods and getting busted through cell phone records.

It’s both profoundly impressive and horrendously creepy that Stu has managed to play Pam for as long as he has, but an unseen interloper spoils the party when the pay phone rings, Stu answers, and is mercilessly taunted by a crackpot extortionist (Kiefer Sutherland), armed with extraordinary insight into Stu’s life. Oh, and he’s also armed with a .30 caliber bolt action rifle with a tactical scope. That’s a real attention getter, and I suspect if JFK had known what was coming, he’d have leaned over and confessed all kinds of things to his better half in a similar moment of clarity. Stu’s softer side begins to emerge, in the way it only can when one is forced to beg for one’s life.

But the man on the other end of the phone doesn’t quite fit the profile of a garden variety psycho killer. The Shooter confesses to having publicly executed a wealthy pedophile and a corrupt Wall Street executive - a stone cold killer-with-a-conscience, avenging their sins for the sake of the public good. And now he’s got his sights on Stu - a liar, a lothario, a paparazzo with a pen. If that’s not bad enough, the Sniper makes an example of a nearby pimp who takes exception to Stu’s monopolization of the phone booth, attracting the largest concentration of stone-faced riot police since the 9/11 attacks.

Lucky for Stu, Forest Whitaker brings his Oscar winning gravitas to the role of Captain Ramey, the obligatory sympathetic detective who senses that something here is not as it seems. He makes it his mission to uncover the truth and extricate Stu safely. The result of this is an interesting game of cat and mouse whereby the Sniper forbids Stu from telling the police what’s happening, Ramey suspects this to be the case, and has to find a way to communicate with Stu without tipping the Sniper off. The Sniper seems keen to prod Stu into a public moral epiphany, but because, as I mentioned, he is also a psycho killer, really gets off on tweaking the police and has taken elaborate measures to cover his tracks.

Obviously, this is a completely ludicrous scenario and it’s very difficult to believe that someone crazy enough to take justice into his own hands with a high powered rifle is also intelligent and resourceful enough to manipulate the public telephone system well enough to pull off some of the things he does in this movie. But the goal here, and the only real dramatic arc in the movie, belongs to Stu, who begins to transition from self-centered douchebag to...something else over the course of his ordeal. I can’t lie - it really is voyeuristically satisfying to see a slimy PR guy get his comeuppance, fantastical as it all may be.

And it’s kind of funny to imagine Kiefer Sutherland as the avenging angel, doing his best Hannibal Lecter impression as he guns down sleazeballs with impunity.

Unfortunately, there’s a point where the story takes a sharp turn, softening its focus on Stu in order to offer a not so subtle swipe at celebrity culture and public obsession with popular media. While Farrell is the mouthpiece, I'm not sure who's giving the speech. Is it Schumacher? That doesn't resonate very well, coming from someone whose professional credibility relies so much on good publicity. Is it Larry Cohen? His screenplay was originally written for Alfred Hitchcock (I’d pay real money to see THAT movie) before getting swept under the rug for decades. I guess if it took me 40 years to get a movie made, I might be a little bitter, too.

And it always feels disingenuous when the media attempts to point the finger at itself - or worse yet, its audience, whose patronage it increasingly craves at any cost. But I don’t know, despite the meta hypocrisy, I kind of enjoy an unapologetic fable once in a while, especially when it's aimed so squarely at adults. Schumacher tastefully directs this film, allowing his actors space to breathe. Farrell carries the film and does so quite well, showing a lot of range and making me feel sad that he’s not more successful than he is today. In fact, while the story’s climax is abrasively melodramatic, I found I cared enough - at least about Stu - to more or less take it in stride.

The ending itself feels like a bit of a copout, but without it we wouldn’t be rewarded with the final scene we get - which is the lesser of two possible options, but definitely the most fun.

Joel Schumacher is an interesting, and often polarizing director. In my opinion, his movies fall into one of three categories. The ones that miss (St Elmo’s Fire, which is awful, and 8MM, which is a Nicholas Cage movie), the ones that come close to the mark (The Lost Boys, Flatliners), and two of my favorite movies that nobody talks about any more - Falling Down and Phone Booth. Neither of those is a perfect film, of course, but in the case of Phone Booth, it accomplishes something that I really love about a well done morality play - it makes me think about myself. It makes me consider the question posed by the story which, in this case, is whether or not I’m being honest with myself and my loved ones about how I live my life.

Maybe that’s an anachronism, in today’s world of shiny, plastic paint-by=numbers event movies that we all forget within 90 minutes - but in this case, it’s also (mostly) a success.