Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: Panic

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they answer a series of discussion questions in the woods while taking potshots at squirrels. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week we’re checking out Panic. William H. Macy stars alongside Donald Sutherland and John Ritter in TV vet Henry Bromell's critically acclaimed hitman-in-crisis film.

Next Week:  Limitless. Wherein drugs make Bradley Cooper better at everything.

In his 2001 review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman said that “Panic offers a more naturalistic analysis of male midlife crisis than the grotesquely overpraised American Beauty.” Is that true?

Jeff Hart:  I wrote about American Beauty last year, specifically about how it hasn’t aged very well. Hoberman’s criticism comes just about a year after American Beauty won the Oscar, so while male midlife crises are still on everyone’s mind, 9/11 hasn’t happened yet. I don’t want to blame everything on 9/11, but the existential crisis movies that came before it all strike me as somewhat quaint because of how drastically the world has changed. Oh, and the financial crisis too! Basically, people’s problems in the late 90s seem really simplistic. Okay, so unnecessary contextualizing aside, Panic is a movie about a hitman family business. With a genre premise as big as that, it’s hard for me to describe the film as naturalistic. That said - William H. Macy is a whole hell of a lot more interesting and sympathetic than Kevin Spacey. And not because he kills people.

Jeremiah White:  I don’t think there is any doubt that Panic is more naturalistic than American Beauty, if only because Panic lacks any kind of satiric element. Once you get past the genre premise (which borders on silly), it’s a subtle movie about a man struggling with his existence. I think part of the reason Macy is more interesting and sympathetic is because there’s no easy fix for his problems. American Beauty turns a midlife crisis into a tidy to-do list: free yourself from the chains of middle class employment, buy a cool car, do drugs. Panic’s take is far more opaque. Macy doesn’t have the blues, he is suffering from a profound and possibly permanent depression. As an audience, we believe Macy’s wife when she says that he’s never been happy, and like Macy, we don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.

Panic features a nonlinear timeline, and starts somewhere in the middle before jumping back in time. Is Bromell another victim of this unfortunate fad?

Jeremiah White:  No. Most movies that start somewhere in the middle, or at the end, do so to show us where they are going. Panic, however, gives away nothing during that first scene. I’m not even really sure when that initial timeline, weeks into Macy’s treatment, is overtaken by the timeline it kicks off, which starts with Macy’s first trips to the psychologist’s office. Panic is much more interested in mood than the specifics of plot. It glides from one short scene to another, separated by unspecified amounts of time, and occasionally jumping years into the past. Ultimately, this lack of an anchor paints Macy’s whole life as a melancholic waking dream. I found it unsettling, and oddly pacifying.

Jeff Hart:  Yeah, I completely agree. The nonlinear timeline here feels more digressive than manipulative.

Does Neve Campbell’s character qualify as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl?

Jeremiah White:  I don’t think so. I shuddered when one of the first things Macy said about Campbell was that she reminded him he wasn’t dead (or whatever). Campbell’s role within the film is similar to that of many Manic Pixie Dream Girls, but she deviates in important ways. Her initial encouragement of Macy’s infatuation is minimal, and she is wary of simply being a passive agent of change in Macy’s own personal narrative. To call her a MPDG would seem logical, but it would dilute the criteria for that label a bit too much. And it would feel unfair to Bromell and Campbell, who have crafted a more nuanced character than most MPDG.

Jeff Hart:  One of the big qualifications for MPDG status, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that the MPDG have no inner life of her own. Campbell’s character has plenty of her own shit to work through, even if we’re only allowed glimpses. She also doesn’t seem at all dedicated to making Macy love life – oftentimes, it seems, she just tortures him. That’s not Dream Girl behavior!

Is David Dorfman (aka, the little kid from The Ring) the greatest child actor ever?

Jeff Hart: He’s really exceptional! I’m usually a big hater of children doing acting, to the point where I wish they’d just dress up adults as children and ask us to suspend disbelief. But Dorfman is really good. His scenes with Macy struck me as genuine and, unlike pretty much every child actor in history, he has mannerisms.

Jeremiah White:  The tragedy of Panic didn’t really hit me until the final scene of Macy and Dorfman chatting in bed. These interactions weren’t just genuine, they made me feel like a fly on the wall observing a real life father and son. It was heartbreaking. I didn’t realize Dorfman was the kid from The Ring, and don’t remember his performance there well enough to make pronouncements about his place among all child actors. But I do know that at one point during Panic, I wondered if kids really talked like Dorfman’s character, and I quickly decided that it didn’t matter because he added much more to the movie as an inquisitive little sentient being than the hollow vessel for “cute” dialogue that many child actors are reduced to.

Where does Panic land in the hitman-in-crisis pantheon?

Jeff Hart:  I really enjoyed Panic and see Macy’s Alex as a worthy addition to the pantheon. The only knock on him is that he doesn’t really do a lot of hitting. He’s way heavier in the crisis department.

Jeremiah White:  It feels a little weird to talk about Panic in these terms, since there is a serious absence of assassin action, but I don’t know if any other hitman-in-crisis movie has done such a thorough job of conveying the emptiness that comes with a lifetime of snuffing out lives, even though it’s a theme that pops up in nearly every one. That easily secures it a place in the pantheon.

Tagged as: david dorfman, henry bromell, hitman in crisis, panic, william h macy