Panic Is a Superior "Small Movie." So Why Didn't Hollywood Notice?

The phrase "small movie" used to mean a film made for little money. Now it means something different: a movie that's primarily concerned with character rather than spectacle; a movie that lets a writer write and actors act; a movie that doesn't fit into a convenient genre heading like "action adventure" or "science fiction" or "horror"; a movie that's rooted in real-world anxieties and emotions, no matter how off-kilter or dreamlike its premise may be. See also: original; good.

Panic, about an unhappy hitman named Alex (William H. Macy) who's trying to get out of his family's murder-for-hire business, is a small movie?and one so peculiar and haunting that its flaws evaporate from the mind. The setup has the hitman, a married father and outwardly respectable suburbanite, working through his anxieties with a shrink (John Ritter) and falling in love with a fellow patient (Neve Campbell); unfortunately, you can't help being reminded of The Sopranos and Analyze This. But the similarity proves superficial. The situation is metaphorical, emotional, dreamlike, yet the emotional stakes and moral implications are taken seriously. The story could be occurring in the same psychic dreamspace staked out by Michael Mann, Jean-Pierre Melville, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luis Buñuel. Which isn't to say that Henry Bromell is the equal of any of those filmmakers, merely that he's pulled off the fiendishly difficult trick of creating a world that's overtly symbolic and movie-like, yet palpably real.

Alex is a good man who was trained to kill by his father, Michael (Donald Sutherland), and taught to be unquestioningly loyal by his mother, Diedre (Barbara Bain, in a chilling performance that recalls Nancy Reagan by way of Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate). His own wife (Tracey Ullman) and six-year-old son (David Dorfman) have no idea what he does for a living; he's an impostor in his own home and an evil presence in a supposedly safe suburban world: a demon who wears the mask of a respectable, mild-mannered middle-class businessman; Willy Loman with a Luger. It's only a matter of time before Alex's parents find out about his therapy and contrive a plan wherein the hitman will murder his own shrink. Yet the transparent movie-ness of this twist is reshaped by Bromell's writing and the cast's performance into a bleakly funny and deeply disturbing predicament: a sick joke with real consequences. The film takes murder, and Alex's distress over killing, far more seriously than The Sopranos?more seriously, indeed, than almost any movie I can think of whose main character is a hitman.

Scene for scene and line for line, Panic is one of the most effective small movies of recent years. The performances are uncannily good. As the lost waif in the waiting room, Campbell delineates a toughness and vulnerability caricatured in the Scream movies; Sutherland's grinning monster of a daddy shows up James Coburn's rotting papa in Affliction for the Stephen King cartoon that he was; and Macy once again confirms his status as the most naturalistic Everyman star in movies?an utterly believable ordinary man who can convey any emotion, from marital distress and mortal fear to adolescent lust and paternal love, with the faintest flutter of his eyelids.

Panic announces the arrival of an exciting and original filmmaking voice, and with proper promotion it might have turned into a modest art house hit?the sort of film that gets strong reviews, pulls in a small and enthusiastic crowd, then lives forever on video. But because the film industry has pursued blockbuster formulas for so long, and has successfully trained audiences to associate small movie values with good tv rather than the big screen, Panic is getting a very limited release?and was lucky to even get that. First time feature-filmmaker Henry Bromell, a veteran novelist and tv writer (Homicide, I'll Fly Away), made the movie handsomely on a comparatively small budget (a little over $2 million), mainly by writing a script that was good enough to attract name actors who were willing to work for union scale, and whose standard price quotes would have normally raised the budget to at least $6 million before a frame of film was shot. He envisioned it as a real movie and shot it in Cinemascope; cinematographer Jeffrey Jur puts the wide frame to stunningly fine use, deploying empty space to suggest the emotional distance between characters and their alienation from their clean-scrubbed corporate-suburban environment.

These efforts were lost on Artisan, the otherwise innovative independent distribution company that made a mint with the brilliantly marketed The Blair Witch Project. The company bought Panic after a well-received debut at last year's Sundance film festival, test-screened it once at a mall to disastrous reactions, then turned around and sold it to HBO, which played it on sister channel Cinemax August of last year without releasing it theatrically.

For obvious reasons, Bromell and the actors were outraged. They never would have worked dirt cheap on a labor-of-love movie, and dedicated their energies toward ensuring it would play as a movie, if they'd thought it would be packaged as a straight-to-cable thriller. Luckily, Roxie Releasing decided to step in and take the picture from city to city. It appears to be finding an audience and is certainly getting good reviews. Why Artisan thought itself incapable of doing the same thing is one of those mysteries that might never be solved.

(It's worth noting here that Roxie performed the same service with Red Rock West, which also was sent packing directly to HBO; it did solid theatrical business and ended up on a number of year-end top-10 lists. Because the film played on tv first, it was ineligible for Academy Award nominations).

If you read about the movie industry, you know it faces an uncertain future. Last year, only a handful of blockbusters (there's that word again) ensured that Hollywood showed financial growth compared to 1999?a familiar pattern that should surprise no one. The exhibitors are filing for Chapter 11 right and left; they've built too many screens, to show titles by distributors who no longer know how to promote movies that do not contain obviously exploitable elements (guns, blood, special effects, teenagers). Is it any wonder that adult film buffs are staying home and watching superior tv dramas like Once and Again, The West Wing, The Sopranos, Law & Order and NYPD Blue?and loading up their VCRs and DVD players with movies they've already seen over and over again?mostly movies with good stories, sharp performances and real emotions? It's been said that viewers don't know what they want until you show it to them; the movie industry has turned that phrase into a self-extinguishing science.