The myth of the 70s Golden Age.
Phone Booth should have caused a sensation. Not for the banal reason that its release was held back six months in deference to last fall's DC sniper panic, but because it rails against what Americans now hold sacrosanct: privilege and audacity. Its story about a man who answers a pay phone and is told by the caller that he will be killed if he hangs up presents both victim Stu (Colin Farrell) and his anonymous predator as warped exponents of free will; each man exemplifies the modern media circumstance of predatory voyeurism and shameless exhibitionism. It's a cinematic examination of the pathology we enjoy as reality tv. In true 2K fashion, the media ignores-or disparages-what it does not approve, so Phone Booth has been unfairly dismissed (and has taken back-seat to the lousiest recent releases-box-office champs Anger Management and Head of State).
The lackluster reception of Phone Booth overshadows the new documentary A Decade Under the Influence, which celebrates the legacy of the 70s American renaissance. For all the lip service paid to 70s American movies, their grappling with social circumstances and moral issues is rarely practiced and even more rarely appreciated. One of the lessons of the 70s era was that filmmakers could use disreputable genres-Easy Rider, The Last American Hero, The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Carrie-to pursue social truths and thus transform thrillers into enlightenment. That's all gone now. As Francis Ford Coppola observes in A Decade, today's movies "are like selling tranquilizers and viagra."
Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme co-directed A Decade, arranging for such well-known figures as Coppola, Julie Christie, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Towne, Sydney Pollack, Paul Mazursky and Paul Schrader to be interviewed about the era's significance. But it all amounts to lipstick vogue. LaGravenese and Demme sought to understand how that golden age of American cinema came about and how far we've fallen from it. Their premise that 70s filmmakers worked under the sway of an activist era and personal political motivation is talked about but never demonstrated-probably due to LaGravenese and Demme's own naivete about how (in Godard's phrase) "a cut is a political act."
This contemporary decline probably explains why Phone Booth was greeted so casually or with such dumbfounded misapprehension. Phone Booth contradicts the past two decades of action cinema (all that convictionless cutting). Part of its pleasure comes from screenwriter Larry Cohen and director Joel Schumacher's brazenly satirizing 2K political unconsciousness.
Its central thesis is that we live in an age with such new modes of digital, satellite communication that we forget our need for true, honest communication. (That's why doubters got hung up on the deliberate anachronism of a functioning phone booth in midtown Manhattan.) The film turns Stu, an entertainment publicist who feeds items to gossip columnists, into the proverbial man-in-the-glass-booth. His morally dubious profession commits "the sin of spin-avoidance and deception." That's how he lives his life juggling and circling around colleagues and women. Confined to a small space, he's deprived of the go-go distractions that made critics praise the inane Speed (1994) as cinema. The emphasis on Stu's character makes Phone Booth echt cinema-a high-pressure, concentrated conceit. No stunt or cgi could be more meaningful than Stu's simple gesture of taking off his wedding ring when calling the woman he wants to make his mistress. At times he's almost romantically harried-as Barbara Stanwyck was in Sorry, Wrong Number.
Stu is poised at the intersection of public guilt and need for fame-both results of our out-of-control media processes. Though simply part of the cycle of media lies, Stu is made responsible for his "crime." Yet Farrell's engaging, emotional performance also shows an average guy forced into a precarious situation, made vulnerable and abused. This turns the table on Stu, whose fast-talking remorselessness immediately evokes the craven Sidney Falco character from Sweet Smell of Success-currently adopted as a favorite fable of cynical, nostalgic New Yorkers. Phone Booth dares not glamorize a showbiz whose insults and damages are ubiquitous-or so Larry Cohen hopes modern viewers will agree.
It is Cohen's almost biblically old-fashioned screenplay that makes Phone Booth special. (Critic Maitland McDonagh wrote that Cohen's "bizarre premises seem like dispatches from some alternate reality.") As in Cohen's 1977 God Told Me To, this story dramatizes how Stu is wracked by guilt. He is told, "You must feel really expensive when you [first] walk out the door." Not even the yuppie-hating 80s produced so devastating a jab. At a Lincoln Center Q&A with Cohen last fall, an audience member summarized how Cohen's characters' conflicts must reflect his own anxieties and mortification. From the 1973 Black Caesar to the 1987 Best Seller, Cohen has always displayed an artist's full-hearted identification with the dilemmas he depicts. He transcended the triteness of b-movies by illuminating and intensifying genuine moral quandary.
This methodology was almost a habit for the best 70s filmmakers (of which Cohen was one). I admit being nostalgic about those films, but I am not nostalgic for the ideas they embodied, because those esthetics and principles are still what define great movies. Even Joel Schumacher, normally a flashy and insubstantial director, makes some apposite visual choices here: The David Fincheresque opening gives Fight Club stylistics a metaphysical basis. When a delivery man, hookers or police approach Stu, their faces loom large and threatening outside the booth. The old street-life rapport Schumacher captured in Car Wash and D.C. Cab reappears in the human circus ringed around Stu; it extends Cohen's concept of prey and predator's shared guilt, shared entrapment-their common suffering in the crazed media whirl. This may seem a facile treatise, but b-movie fans know that sometimes the simplest observations can be poetic. And Farrell's a lucky actor indeed when he gets to show Stu's breakdown and utter some of Cohen's most poignant verse: "I'm just flesh and blood and weakness," and "I've never done anything for anyone who couldn't do something for me." These lines are breathtakingly to the point; they cut to the bone of fallibility and greed glossed over in today's affluent, celebrity-mad environment.
It's easy to look back on the 70s with hindsight certainty that Coppola, Altman and Scorsese were kings when, in fact, Blazing Saddles, Jaws, The Exorcist and Star Wars were more popular. A Decade glorifies the 70s as a preamble to today's solipsistic indie movement in which self-centered filmmakers fancy themselves part of a maverick tradition. But what good is extolling that tradition if we can't recognize its true embodiment? A Decade praises 70s directors for reflecting their times, but the times are always in the work of conscientious artists-this was true in the 70s even with the Old Guard: Wyler, Huston, Siegel, Kazan. And it's the recognizable reflection of today's social essence that makes Phone Booth phenomenal.
In A Decade, Polly Platt describes her collaboration on Targets, Bogdanovich's debut feature also about a sniper: "Modern horror was somebody shooting at you for no reason," she says. But the scariest idea in Phone Booth is Cohen's demonstration through Stu, his assailant and the police commander (Forrest Whitaker, movingly sharing Stu's sexual humiliation), that as a society we are bonded to each other through guilt and responsibility.
Today's moviegoers aren't in the habit of soul searching, but self-examination is exactly what Phone Booth has in common with 70s films. Although A Decade ascribes to that era the valor of a counterculture, it doesn't explain the 70s' most in-your-face film, Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. This is one of the toughest movies ever made, due to Peckinpah's stripping male ego to its animal essence. Its generic revision-essentially a contemporary western pitting a man of reason against brutes-grips viewers' identification and empathy. The only "other" in this movie-whether female or underclass-is a projection of the protagonist's (Dustin Hoffman) own insecurities. And Peckinpah exposes those by literally testing his "flesh and blood and weakness." Straw Dogs gets no showcase in a film culture ignorant about the inquiry of Phone Booth, but the next best thing to a theatrical revival is the new Criterion DVD that preserves the awesome intensity of Peckinpah's Everymale nightmare.