A Competent Re-Working of the Rear Window Story for the Modern Generation

Rating: 7/10 (16 April 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 pizazz 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