There is something about William H Macy’s face that perfectly sums up the tone of Henry Bromwell’s strange, excellent little movie Panic. Macy’s squarish, worn visage is a combination of vulnerability and a quality that makes you want to laugh at it; he’s a sad clown, except that he entirely lacks the flamboyance you’d expect of most clowns, and he appears to
be so completely ordinary. He has brought these qualities — which seem extended seamlessly from his face to his style as an actor — to interesting roles in interesting movies such as Fargo, State and Main and Magnolia.
In Panic, Macy plays Alex, a middle-aged — or at least ageing — man still struggling to escape his father’s shadow. This is difficult because Alex is in the family business — and the family business is assassination. It’s also hard because Dad (Donald Sutherland) is not at all keen to let him go and get on with a normal life.
His uncertainties lead Alex to the consulting rooms of a shrink (John Ritter), where he meets a beautiful young woman (Neve Campbell, beginning to do some real acting) for whom he develops a fascination. This seems like your typical male midlife crisis, except that for Alex it goes a lot deeper: it’s not just about being dissatisfied with his life as it stands, or his sense of missed opportunity; it’s about finally growing up and becoming his own person. In that respect, Panic is about much more than male “menopause”. It is a savage critique of the way masculinity is constructed, of the way fathers oppress their sons into becoming bastards like them. (And, insofar as Mom supports Dad, it’s about the family as the crucible of neurosis.) Underlying it all, and brought into focus by the fact that both father and son are hitmen by trade, is a whole masculinist, survivalist warrior ethos, one that still deforms our culture.
Saying that, though, makes Panic sound like a heavy sociological text — and it’s not. The film is distinguished by its light touch, which is perhaps why it confused its distributors, who nearly didn’t release it. Some viewers will dislike it for the same reasons. I found it entertaining though unsettling, and thought at first it might be a rather slight piece, but it stayed with me, and its images kept resonating in my head.
Panic is not quite a black comedy — its humour is more deadpan ironic than outright jokey. It’s not straightforward realism, not quite surrealism, not quite absurdism, though the absurd hovers at the edges of a movie that seriously and compassionately presents a meticulously realised world, and it follows its own impeccable logic to the end. Which is to say, as the movie seems to, that life is absurd. This is what provides its odd, indeterminate tone, which has a family resemblance to Todd Solondz’s brilliant, disturbing Happiness. Panic is marvellously well done; it is worth seeing just for the fact that it is so unlike most other movie product.
It is also worth seeing for its great performances. Macy, at the movie’s centre, is note-perfect, as is Tracey Ullmann as his increasingly perplexed wife. But most impressive of all is Sutherland as the coolly evil father; his portrayal of understated malevolence is quite superb, one of the best roles ever undertaken by a remarkably subtle and versatile actor. Barbara Bain, as Alex’s mother, supports him admirably. Their joint portrait of icy parental nastiness is so frightening that, given the choice, you would prefer the mad, drunken George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as your mom and dad.
Countering that part of the story, though, is another narrative strand, one which places all this squarely in the realm of the most affecting human emotions and draws the necessary contrasts between the two father-son interactions in the film. This other, countervailing strand is the relationship between Alex and his own son, the six-year-old Sammy (David Dorfman). Its freewheeling, easy affection and mutual enjoyment are deeply touching. It is hard to believe, in fact, so natural are the scenes between the two of them, that the boy is acting; one begins to wonder whether he isn’t Macy’s real son.
And one comes back to Macy’s extraordinary face. It’s not just the strange mixture of qualities that so aptly represent the film’s mixture of feelings. There’s also something childish in Macy’s face, as though the child he once was — and his character still is — remains, trapped, inside the fading features of a middle-aged man.