Phone Booth Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)April 7th, 2003
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
PHONE BOOTH
Directed by Joel Schumacher
R, 81 minutes
Three Stars
A half-century or so ago, when television was young and radio was in its prime, tight, well-crafted little dramas surged out of typewriters like eager young recruits, and flung themselves in waves before live network microphones and cameras. There were shows like Playhouse 90 and Studio One, Mercury Theatre Of The Air and Lux Radio Theater, with directors like DeMille and Welles and Hitchcock, writers like Chayevsky, Miller, Vidal, and Serling, and all the stars of Broadway and Hollywood. Most of those dramas lived for an hour and were forgotten, but a few found life after broadcast as movies, like "Sorry, Wrong Number", "Marty", and "Requiem for a Heavyweight". It was the Golden Age of Broadcasting. And in New York City, there were telephone booths on every block.
Live drama is long gone from the airwaves, and New York's phone booths have gone the way of the Dodo and the Syrian Wild Ass. But a tight, well-crafted little movie has come along to remind us of those thrilling days of yesteryear. "Phone Booth" has the feel of something concocted for one of those two-camera shows broadcast from a little studio high above Sixth Avenue, and then born again as a feature film. So it comes as no surprise to find that the writer is a man whose career reaches back to mid-century. Larry Cohen's writing credits begin at the dawn of the Sixties, on shows like "The Defenders" and "The Fugitive".
He claims to have once pitched the idea for "Phone Booth" to Alfred Hitchcock, and for the sake of the material it's too bad the master of suspense didn't pick up on it. The project has passed over the years through a lot of directors and stars - Brad Pitt, Mel Gibson, and Jim Carrey were linked to the project at various times - before finally coming to the screen under the guiding hand of Joel Schumacher, who makes good films ("Flatliners", "Tigerland") and bad ones ("8 MM").
In the role of Stu Shepard, a fast-talking, shallow-living New York publicist, Schumacher has cast Colin Farrell, the talented, rising young Irish hunk he discovered for "Tigerland" and who recently appeared as Tom Cruise's bureaucratic tormentor in "Minority Report". Stu is a sort of latter-day Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis's character in "Sweet Smell of Success"). He fawns over those above him on the food chain, and treats underlings like dirt. He has a loving wife named Kelly (Radha Mitchell), and dishonorable designs on a young client named Pamela (Katie Holmes), two good actresses who here get to illustrate the point about the paucity of good parts for women. He spends most of his life on his cell phone, but to sweet-talk Pamela he needs a phone that won't betray a suspicious number when Kelly pays the bills. And so, fatefully, he has taken to dropping by Manhattan's last remaining phone booth, at 53rd and 8th.
This turns out to be a bad idea, because the phone booth has been staked out from an apartment across the street by a gun-wielding psycho with an Old-Testament God complex (mellifluously voiced by Kiefer Sutherland). All we know about the Caller is that he's a techno-wizard who has rigged the phone line so his location can't be traced, he's done his homework on what a scumbag Stu is, and he's already picked off a couple of moral lowlifes (a pornographer and a Ken Lay-type executive) whom he deemed fit candidates for his just wrath. When Stu ends his call to Pamela, the phone in the booth rings, and reflexively he picks it up. And there he jolly well is for the rest of the movie, threatened with death by sniper fire if he hangs up. The Caller shoots a neighborhood pimp to show Stu he means business, the booth is quickly surrounded by cops, TV cameras, tourists, Kelly, and Pamela, and it would not be an exaggeration to say it quickly turns into the worst day of Stu's life.
Cohen has a morality play in mind, and Stu is forced to strip himself emotionally naked, confessing to Kelly and Pamela and all the ships at sea what a slime he is. Meanwhile the cops, headed by Captain Ramey (Forest Whitaker), are convinced that Stu killed the pimp, and are trying to get him to put down the phone and give himself up. And this, of course, he cannot do.
But truth to tell, Stu isn't that much worse than the rest of us. He lies and cheats and treats people rudely, but that's only a matter of degree, and if lust in the heart (he hasn't bedded Pamela yet) is a mortal sin, the Caller could have started with Jimmy Carter. It's Stu's Everyman quality, reinforced by a terrific performance from Farrell complete with credible New York accent, that keeps our sympathies and our attention riveted on that phone booth for the length of the movie.
That length is surprisingly short - the movie lists as 81 minutes, and some of those minutes are taken up by credits. Schumacher keeps things taut and focused, only losing his head over gimmicks like fast-motion and picture-in-picture inserts, distractions that Hitchcock would surely have disdained.
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