Sunday, September 14, 2003		Hollywood Hues

A watchable drama in Phone Booth

Smell fear in Phone Booth

TAKE a high-flying, smooth-talking, ultra-cool Press agent/publicist with a string of wannabes on his list of clients, a guy who thinks the world revolves around him but is guilty of indignation to his fellowmen, a real creep if ever there was one. And what do we do with him ? Well, put him in a spot, which in this case is a Phone Booth, and this is also the name of the film.

For the next 70-odd minutes (the duration of the film is only 80 minutes) our flim-flam man Stuart "Stu" Shepherd (Colin Farrell) is in a tizzy, besieged by a caller who knows the story of his life and wants to transform his wicked, wicked ways. On the corner of 53rd and 8th in New York it is probably the last existing phone booth in the Big Apple. And the sniper (Kiefer Sutherland) is speaking to him, on the phone, from a front window.

If in the recent film The Ring the caller pledges death in seven days, in Phone Booth the threat is intensified or instant, he will die if he steps out of the booth.

It’s an unusual situation, shades of Tony Curtis as the PR agent in Sweet Smell of Success a few decades ago. How they love to take a swipe at these smooth-talking, slimy PR men. And boy, does the sniper get to him? He knows about his love affair with wannabe actress Pamela (Katie Holmes) and gets her on the line. Next he gets Stu’s wife Kelly (Radha Mitchell) to tell her about Stu’s extra-curricular activities. In a little less than an hour, our Mr Cool is paranoid and jittery, virtually on his knees, begging for mercy, because as part of his terror tactics he kills an innocent spectator.

"You can smell fear, it reminds me of Nam," the sniper tells him in a taut script by Larry Cohen and you wonder how old the sniper is but he immediately demolishes the thought, saying he’d have to be over 50 to be a victim of the post-Vietnam syndrome. There are other minor asides strewn in to provide humour but all the time the viewer is almost with the sniper, shades of the ones in The Day of the Jackal or In the Line of Fire. In fact the sniper is always chuckling and giving this conman a dose of his own medicine and Mr Knowall is in a spot he probably never envisaged. May be it is a long overdue swipe at these so-called fixers. But the "confrontation" between wife and lover gives it a tragic-comic twist. And then there’s the final twist.

It is compelling stuff, not a single loose frame and director Joel Schumacher, whose Falling Down (Michael Douglas) was brilliant and who’s been around for almost two decades since St. Elmo’s Fire, is in total control of the situation, having our hero like a puppet on a string. The best part of the film is that it is qualitative and does not believe in stretching it to 120 minutes like so many others these days. Why, not even 90 minutes, and that’s the best reason for its success.

Colin Farrell who was earlier directed by Schumacher in Tigerland as an unruffled as a Vietnam recruit, is seen in a completely different light here. It only shows his versatility. Kiefer Sutherland’s is the voice of the sniper and he is enigmatic. Forrest Whataker is the sympathetic police captain while Katie Holmes and Radha Mitchell etch good cameos in this taut, absorbing, not-to-be-missed entertainer.

— EM