Eagle Eye (2008)

D.J. Caruso's last picture Disturbia looked so much like Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window it prompted a lawsuit from one of the latter's copyright holders, the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust. After watching Caruso's new Eagle Eye, I would advise Ernest Lehman's estate to consult with their attorneys because this time he's riffing, rather blatantly, on North by Northwest. Finally, we have a Brian De Palma for the Even Stevens crowd.

The movie is about an average guy with a below average beard named Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf), who returns to his tiny Chicago apartment one day to discover it is full of explosives and weapons. An anonymous woman calls his cell phone and tells him the FBI is about to break into his house and arrest him on charges of terrorism. She is correct and soon Jerry's being interrogated by Agent Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thorton) who refuses to believe the young man's story. As far as Agent Morgan's concerned, they've caught Jerry red-handed. Jerry protests: if he was a terrorist, how stupid would he have to be to keep a cache of bombs where everyone knows he lives? It's an excellent point but Morgan dismisses it. Either this is a commentary on the U.S. government's willingness to to believe any evidence, no matter how dubious (not impossible, given the movie's themes) or very lazy screenwriting (also not impossible, given the number of other coincidences in this film, including the fact that the entire narrative rests on -- get ready -- identitcal twins).

Eventually, the same mystery woman facilitates Jerry's escape from custody and sends him on a wild goose chase south by southeast towards Washington D.C., where the climax is lifted right out of another Hitchcock movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much. Along the way he picks up a cute sidekick (Michelle Monaghan) who, conveniently, has a child in danger (to enhance the suspense) but not a husband (to diminsh the sexual tension with LaBeouf). The woman on Jerry's phone is impossibly powerful: she can change traffic lights, or stop subways, or topple enormous electrical towers instantly at will. She can even listen to people on their cell phones when they're turned off, as foreshadowed in a none-too-subtle news report overheard by Jerry just before his life unravels.

Apparently, this technology does exist. Eagle Eye's creators would probably argue that the movie is extremely timely because it addresses threats to our privacy, and presents things like these "roving bugs" to a mainstream audience. But it's almost the opposite; by placing these plausible notions into an entirely implausible thriller, Caruso almost encourages audiences not to worry about them. No one will ever walk out of Eagle Eye concerned for their privacy because the movie takes genuinely disturbing concepts and plays them as dumb science-fiction. Anytime an opportunity to engage with some of these issues presents itself, it beats them back with another uninspired, excessively edited action sequence. It's one thing to make an escapist action picture that exists in its own universe; it's another to address our world and its problems and then trivialize it with cliche and formula.

That aside, I will say there is a quality to LaBeouf that I like in action pictures, and it's something he brought to Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull even with all those films' flaws. Even in the dreckiest dreck he's engaged. When he runs onscreen, it's him and not a stunt double, and he's running top speed with a sense of urgency that is missing from a lot of older actors. That might change with age -- LaBeouf is only 23 -- but for now he does have an appeallingly energetic presence.

Ultimately Eagle Eye is different enough from North by Northwest (and Disturbia from Rear Window) to render lawsuits moot, but you'd be a fool not to recognize the earlier films' influence on Caruso's. Maybe that's what he had in mind in selecting Jerry Shaw's employer: Copy Cabana, a movie version of Kinko's.

"Welcome to Copy Cabana. What would you like me to copy next?"

The Paradine Case (1947)

Look, I'll be honest. I barely made it all the way through The Paradine Case. There were a couple moments there around the one hour ten minute mark where I was strongly considering turning it off; if I didn't want to be able to say I had seen it and thus knock another of the remaining Alfred Hitchcock films off my "must see list" (or, in this case, the "must endure list") I almost certainly would have turned my attention to another delightful episode of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares.

The movie follows a married British lawyer (Gregory Peck) who falls for his vampy client (Alida Valli), who may or may not have killed her blind old husband. Though it's basically a courtroom drama, and ultimately something of a murder mystery, The Paradine Case rests on the tension between the characters: Peck's troubles with his wife (Ann Todd), his lust for his client, the client's manipulation of Peck. But all of the casting is off (something Hitchcock himself acknowledged in his book-length interview with Francois Truffaut) and so's the chemistry: Peck claims that he's "fallen in love" with Valli though her looks certainly aren't the type to drop your jaw and their brief conversations in her jail cell have all the sexual tension of a Walmart employee training video.

Valli's performance may be the worst of anyone in any Hitchcock movie I've seen. She's got two expressions: stiff intensity and intense stiffness. Hitchcock liked his women mysterious, and the suspense in many of his best movies rises out of our trying to suss out a female character's true intentions and motivations. Valli's Mrs. Paradine is passive in the best of times, resigned to death at the worst. In his discussions about the movie with Truffaut he notes that one of the things that interested him about the story was the idea of an ordinary (and, potentially, innocent) person being sent to jail; watching a person who isn't accustomed to being locked up having to struggle with the brutal conditions of incarceration. I'd guess that Hitchcock's much longer original cut included a great deal more material of Mrs. Paradine's time in prison but the theatrical print (whose editing was supervised by Selznick after he didn't want to keep paying Hitchcock his going rate of $1,000 a day) removes all but a few faint traces of this theme from the story.

Some of the familiar Hitchcock archetypes are off as well. Hitchcock continually returned to people getting wrongfully accused (which, of course, plays off that fear of being wrongfully imprisoned) but (SPOILERS) Mrs. Paradine ain't so innocent. She's also not blonde -- which is typically a big deal in Hitchcock's pictures. Here the blonde is Peck's wife and she's frumpy and boring, instead of alluring and mysterious (basically what Mrs. Paradine is supposed to be). I also couldn't help but notice that many of my favorite Hitchcock pictures — Psycho, The 39 Steps, Frenzy — are all about characters near the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Everyone in The Paradine Case is a lord or a lady, and they've all got incredible suits, and butlers and maids, and gorgeous houses. It's all a bit too stuffy for really juicy Hitchcock.

Speaking of stuffy, that leads me to the one thing that really impressed me about The Paradine Case. The film is shot entirely on soundstages, something not all that unusual for Hitchcock, who preferred the control afforded to him by studio shoots. But it's almost claustrophobic in its near total lack of exterior scenes. The setting doesn't really afford Hitchcock much room for elaborate camera moves, and the subject doesn't lend itself to flashy special effects shots. So Hitchcock focuses instead on lighting. The way he uses light and shadow on certain characters faces is really quite remarkable; in this YouTube clip (which is grainy, but does a better job of showing you what I want you to see than any pictures I could find online) you can see how he highlights Mrs. Paradine's importance, as well as her emotional distance from everyone around her, by constantly bathing her face in these early scenes with harsh white light. Even when she's standing very close to other characters whose faces are either partly or completely engulfed in shadow she remains perfectly — and somewhat ominously — lit.




There's some similar work in the climactic courtroom scenes where the frame is filled with maybe a dozen actors but the light seems to shine only on Peck. It's a marvelous way to focus an audience's attention on one actor without having to resort to a close-up where you'd lose the geography of the setting. I have to tell you there were times I hated The Paradine Case but seeing Hitchcock's visual mastery shine through the drab performances and screenplay and a producer's unnecessary meddling made it worth my time.