Phone Booth

Once intended as a vehicle for Jim Carrey, “Phone Booth” is result of the creative pairing of a screenplay by exploitation flick auteur Larry Cohen (“It’s Alive,” “Scream, Baby, Scream.” Black Caesar”) and director Joel Schumacher, a director with a long history of technically proficient schlock (‘Batman & Robin,” “Bad Company,” “ “8MM”). But wait—it’s not as bad as it sounds.

“Phone Booth” tells the story of one very bad day in the life of Stu Sheppard (Farrell), a self-centered publicist who’s juggling a wife (Radha Mitchell), a girlfriend (Katie Holmes), and a career promoting his marginally-talented clients. Everyday at the same time, Stu comes to the same New York City phone booth to call his girlfriend, Pamela (using the pay phone so that his wife won’t see the calls on his cell phone bill and get suspicious). On this particular day, when he hangs up with Pamela, the phone rings, and Stu—thinking it’s Pamela calling back—answers it.

The voice on the other end of the line (Kiefer Sutherland) tells him that if he hangs up the phone, he'll be shot—a claim that’s confirmed by the appearance of the red targeting dot of an infrared rifle scope on Stu’s chest. The unnamed, unseen sniper proves his willingness to pull the trigger when he guns down a neighborhood pimp tries to evict Stu from the booth, causing a panic on the street and drawing the attention of the media, and of the police, led by Captain Ramey (Forest Whitaker).

Since no one saw what really happened and no one has seen the invisible sniper or heard the shot from the silenced rifle, Ramey assumes that Stu is the killer. And what does the gunman really want? He wants to Stu to come clean. He wants Stu to know what it’s like to be played. Stu struggles to find a way to convince Ramey that has not a killer, and save himself and his wife and girlfriend from the real threat, all without leaving the booth.

Given the film’s improbable premise the (clearly Hitchcock-influenced) designed limitations of its mis en scene, the dramatic effectiveness of “Phone Booth” depends almost entirely on the performances of Farrell and Sutherland (whose performance is delivered almost entirely as voiceover). Farrell does an efficient, admirable job, but Sutherland as the nameless man pointing his rifle at Stu is the real highlight of the film. Instead of playing his killer as a frothing madman, he plays him as an irrefutable moral authority—a modernized likeness of a wrathful Old Testament God. That Stu’s sins are small ones—relatively speaking—never enters their dialogue. Stu’s a sinner, and he’s either penitent, or . . .

The story ‘Phone Booth’ was evocative enough to last year’s wave of sniper attacks in the Washington DC area that the studio delayed the film’s theatrical release by several months. What it’s really tapping into, though, is the fear and insecurity of the post-9/11 world—that you never really know who has a weapon, that you probably will never see it coming and never know why, and that you can’t protect yourself (as a individual or as a nation) without looking like the bad guy.

“Phone Booth” is a stylish, well-constructed thriller, and, though the film makes it hyperbolically, moral point the film builds to as you sweat through Stu’s crisis along with him is one worthy of further consideration upon leaving the theater—what we do to people, how we treat them, how we speak to them, how we appear to them, even those we don’t know and may never see, not only matters, but it comes back to us in ways that we could not previously have fathomed.

Matt Parks (April 19, 2003)