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How To Handle a Woman
Slate.com
18 August 2005
By David Edelsteinted
Red Eye (DreamWorks), directed by Wes Craven, is a minimalist exercise in maximalist suspense. It's mostly two people, the heroine and the bad guy, sitting next to each other on an airplane: tight close-ups, Hitchcockian subjective tracking shots up and down the aisles, and plenty of turbulence to rock the frame. And the movie takes off and lands in a trim 85 minutes: the perfect length, with no changing planes.
Super-cutie Rachel McAdams plays Lisa, a super-competent people-pleasing luxury hotel manager who's flying home to Miami after her grandmother's funeral. McAdams had to deal with Owen Wilson's adorable subterfuge in Wedding Crashers, but it's nothing compared to what she gets from Cillian Murphy as someone who calls himself Jack Rippner.
Murphy is the guy who battled viral zombies in 28 Days Later and put a gas-spewing bag over his head in Batman Begins. With his pallor, cut-glass cheekbones and glazed blue eyes, he's right on the border between dreamboat and spooky freak. He and Lisa meet cute in the ticket line when he defends a harried agent from an impatient blowhard, cute again when they share Bay Breeze cocktails at the bar, and cute once more when it turns out he has the seat next to hers on the plane. He jokes that she's stalking him. Heh-heh.
You won't hear from me what happens next—only that the flatness of the setup is nicely creepy and that it gets even creepier once Rippner makes his intentions plain. I will say that a hawkish (but heroic) homeland security chief is in peril, and so is Lisa's dad, played by Brian Cox—who has dropped some weight and, thanks to an odd brown thatch, some years.
There's a theme here having to do with Lisa being too much of a super-competent people-pleaser to stand up for herself in a crisis. But this is the sort of thriller that really comes down to the teasing use of props and characters-as-props: a pen, a book, a friendly old lady, a curious little girl, a plane phone, a cell phone. On the edge of a people-mover, Craven serves up a low-angle shot that's a masterpiece of composition, and there's no loss of momentum in the more conventional climax. Yes, it's the same old stalking-killer-with-a-knife bit. But this is Wes Craven, of Scream and Scream 2 and—oh yeah—Scream 3, and Wes knows from stalking-killer-with-a-knife scenes. He must have already used every "Boo!" setup imaginable, and he still comes up with a couple of new ones to make you jump. What a treat.
