*** (out of ****)
Starring Colin Farrel, Forest Whitaker, Radha Mitchell, Katie Holmes, and Tia Texada
Directed by Joel Schumacher & written by Larry Cohen
2002 R
One of the delicious ironies of the cinema is the “high-concept” movie, which is loosely defined as a flick that can be summed up in one sentence. Of course, the irony is that, as entertaining as these movies sometimes are, there frequently is very little “high” about them. Phrases from the high-concept sentence often consist of “hijackers take over,” “two cops who don’t get along,” “and only one man can stop them,” and “is back from the dead.” Occasionally someone hits on a really, really clever high-concept, maybe even a genuinely “high” one, and it’s so good that the movie seems to write itself. “Phone Booth” falls into this category, although I’m confident screenwriter Larry Cohen will probably tell you “like hell it wrote itself.”
Here’s the high-concept: a sleazy talent agent (Colin Farrell of "Minority Report") is trapped in a New York phone booth by a mad sniper. A man is shot in the street; a SWAT team arrives with a negotiator; a stand-off ensues; Farrell is accused by witnesses of being armed. Why is the sniper doing all this? Is he crazy? Is he angry at the world? Does he have a score to settle with the talent agent, professionally or personally? Farrell, as the man trapped in the phone booth, tries all these possibilities, but it turns out that all the sniper wants is for the talent agent to confront his true self and the jerk that he’s become.
And what a world-class jerk he is. Farrell begins the movie in a sharp suit with a cell phone, talking fast, making deals, arranging contracts and parties for his clients, which include rappers, models, and singers. The arrangements he makes are too slick and perfect to be legitimate or legal, but his sly confidence and sycophancy are like a kind of magic. As far as we know Farrell doesn’t even have an office, he’s just striding down the street, treating everyone he meets like garbage. He phones his wife (Rhada Mitchell), phones his girlfriend (Katie Holmes), swears up and down that he’ll pay his assistant, and keeps all his plates spinning, aided by an bottomless capacity for lies and arrogance. That is, until…
The phone in the phone booth rings and Farrell answers it. The man on the other end knows everything about him, his wife, his mistress, all his cons and insecurities. As if that weren’t bad enough, he’s got a gun and he’s in one of the buildings across the street. Excuse me—he’s got a gun and he’s in one of the buildings across the street!!
That’s the set-up, and the result is something like Jerry Springer crossed with “A Christmas Carol” at gunpoint. Farrell must confess everything, and not just to his wife, but to the quickly assembled throngs of onlookers and mass media parasites, which seems to be the only way that people in show business can find absolution nowadays. He tries to weasel his way out, he tries to soften his sins, but the sniper won’t let him. When Farrell tells his wife he wants to “sleep with” his girlfriend, the sniper says that isn’t good enough. What you want to do, the sniper insists, can only be properly expressed with the F word.
Joel Schumacher ("Falling Down") directs “Phone Booth” in almost real-time, and gives the movie perhaps one layer of gloss too many. Quick cutting is the order of the day, but it matches Farrell’s hyperactive personality, and cinematographer Matthew Libatique gives New York a grey-blue cast not unlike “The Matrix” or a music video. The use of split screen during Farrell’s numerous and convoluted conference calls is a nice touch, but are the imaginary roller coaster rides up and down fiberoptic cables and into outer space really necessary?
Present in virtually every single shot, Colin Farrell is the center of the movie. He gives the kind of fast-talking, shifty-eyed, fireworks performance that, in the unlikely event of 2003’s prestige movies being slow when it comes to male leads, could lead to an Oscar nomination. He wouldn’t win, but he might get nominated. Extra credit goes to Larry Cohen, not just for coming up with the scenario, but for writing Farrell dialogue that gives his character a lively and believable history, stretching back years, without resorting to flashbacks or tons of characters.
Farrell is joined by the always interesting and sad-eyed Forest Whitaker as a police captain trying to keep the circus under control. As his wife and girlfriend, respectively, Rhada Mitchell and Katie Holmes are effective without being distracting. That’s the point: everything in “Phone Booth” must lead to the battle of wills and wits between the hunter and the hunted. Initial advertisement for “Phone Booth” did not reveal the man behind the rifle. Even though the DVD now trumpets his name in big letters on the cover, I will omit it (in protest?), hoping that his cunning, practically voice-only performance might rename nicely anonymous.
As for the history of his character, well, little is given, because none would be entirely satisfactory. It may be best to think of him as a fallen angel, like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in “Dogma:” all-seeing, all-knowing, and out to enforce morality by immoral means.
Finished September 22, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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