Review: Disturbia (2007)

Disturbia
reviewed by Samuel Osborn


Talking to Dylan McDermott about The Messengers a couple months ago,
the topic of remakes was brought up. I asked if people would write his
film off as an Asian knock-off of Hitchcock's The Birds. He said,
maybe cynically, in response: "Unfortunately, there's a whole audience
out there that doesn't remember The Birds. Nobody cares. The trouble
with making movies is that every ten years it's a whole new
generation. It's all about getting the teenagers in the theatre. The
thirteen year old girl rules this world." And so now we have
Disturbia, a PG-13 remake-in-spirit of Hitchcock's Rear Window. But
before we all turn the page and look for a better movie to see, allow
me to clarify any misconception. The target demographic may still be
the thirteen year old girl, but Disturbia is a competent re-working of
Rear Window for the modern generation. Jimmy Stewart had only
binoculars and a telescopic lens to perform his long-range detective
work. Shia LaBeouf has a cell phone, an iPod, a digital camcorder,
live video feeds, and the internet on his side. Technology is this
generation's Cultural Revolution and it's shifted the way we are
sensitive to those around us. Disturbia is hyper-aware of this
development and employs it smartly towards a story that is valid and
justified in its re-telling.

Sentenced to three months of house arrest for the summer between his
Junior and Senior year at High School, Kale Brecht (Shia LaBeouf) is
bored out his noggin. His mother's discontinued his Itunes account,
cancelled his Xbox Live subscription and sliced the wire powering his
bedroom television. The punishment arises out of Kale's raging
outbreak at school that rounded out the third in a three strike penal
system. Charges were pressed and Kale got slapped with an ankle
bracelet that has the cops skidding up to his driveway any time he
leaves the 100-foot radius surrounding his home. The only thing
distracting him is the perpetually swimming next-door neighbor Ashley
(Sarah Roemer), just moved-in from the city. Kale schedules his day
around her swimming and yoga cycles, microwaving a bowl of popcorn and
lounging in a chair with his good friend the binoculars to his eyes.
She catches him one day and mutual teenaged horniness welds a
friendship spent trading binos spying on the neighbors. Soon they
notice some striking correlations between Mr. Turner (David Morse)
across the street and the unidentified stalker lifting women from the
city. Wild conspiracies are formed and soon they've launched an
impromptu control center in Kale's house, playing detectives with
modern technology filling their holsters.

Shia LaBeouf, the young actor steadily separating himself from his
Disney Channel origins, joins Justin Chatwin (The Invisible), Adam
Brody (In the Land of Women), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (The Lookout)
in a gaggle of promising young male actors with medium-sized movies
releasing this month. He finishes a close second to the moody-faced,
brilliant Gordon-Levitt, but nevertheless turns in a compelling
argument for casting directors to place him in more leading roles for
the future. The rest of the characters are also cast exceptionally
well, particularly Kale's parents played by Matt Craven and an
underused Carrie-Anne Moss.

Director DJ Caruso took on the ambitious, potentially pretentious
project apparently without any intention of mimicking Mr. Hitchcock.
His style is sometimes inspired, but mostly mainstream. The opening
father-son fishing sequence is expectedly touching, lit warmly and
with a pleasant orchestral score purring along with the river. The
script, penned by Christopher Landon and Red Eye veteran Carl
Ellsworth, pulls most of the weight cinematically. Much of our belief
in Kale's character hinges on the realism of his pain over the death
of his father. One scene is taken to build the connection between
father and son (the fishing scene, incidentally), and another scene to
kill the father off. Landon and Ellsworth ace the fishing scene with
the kind of easy dialogue that's organic enough to not set us off to
the father's impending doom. Finishing the one-two punch, Mr. Caruso
plays his singular card of directorial pizzazz and scares the hell out
of us with a cruel scene of vehicular misfortune.

The rest of the film finds Mr. Caruso leaning heavily on the
screenplay which switches rapidly between Kale and Ashley's romance
and the terror across the neighborhood. The romance, though charming
at times, is stilted with glib dialogue for Ashley. The writing pair
apparently weren't too popular with the ladies in high school and
understand them only well enough to make Ashley into an
unrealistically seductive vixen. She isn't as human as the other
characters, crippling the romantic segments significantly. And as in
Red Eye, just as the tension mounts to a level of satisfying
discomfort, the story unravels into an extended climax of action-film
vapidity.

But Disturbia works aside from all the moving parts of its strange
device as a spiritual Rear Window remake. The film finds the colorful
nature of a teenaged summer spent trapped in suburbia. The obsessions
and the romances are mutually desperate and, in the same way,
intensely gratifying. What you find holed away in a tract-home
existence at seventeen, whether it's a murderer or a first love, is
something, anything to hold on to.
Samuel Osborn