Old vs. New: Rear Window vs. Disturbia

It’s officially a new year! Congratulations! You survived! How does it feel? Good? Yeah? Good. We had a lot of fun last year looking at TV shows and movies, and I'm thoroughly looking forward to keeping that train rolling. There are a number of changes coming. Some have already happened: 

Seventy pages of pristine college ruled awesomeness....

Some are yet to come, but I promise, it's going to be an exciting year for all of us. Anyway, seeing as it’s a time when we focus on ridding ourselves of the old and ringing in the new, I figured it was a great time for another old versus new. I think the title more or less says it all, but there’s always more to the story than what’s on the surface when you stop into Critical Mass, and such is definitely the case here as well. As I scrambled to find that perfect combination of old movies with modern remakes, I was looking for a pairing that I thought would be fairly mismatched. What could be more mismatched than a modern retelling of a Alfred Hitchcock film? I dunno! I expected this to be open and shut because, ya know, Hitchcock, but I was quite pleasantly surprised by the results of this particular exercise. Why? Let’s find out!

Rear Window (1954):

As I said, Rear Window was directed by the legendary Alfred Hitchcock who had suspense and thrillers down to a science. The movie stars James Stewart as L B Jeffries and Grace Kelly as Lisa. Already we have some pretty heavy ammunition, and those are just the names that I recognize. Fortunately, the story is pretty straightforward. Jeffries is a world class photographer working for a major magazine who got his leg broken taking pictures of an accident at a motor sporting event. Interestingly, this isn’t spelled out expositionally. We’re given this bit of background through a series of images in pictures and set pieces that I found pretty easy to follow. Well played, Alfred. Well played. We find out that Jeffries has been laid up in his apartment in a wheelchair for six weeks. He can’t leave because, well, he’s in a full leg cast. To pass the time, he spends his day watching his neighbors through his window. He lives in an apartment block, and there’s a terraced courtyard where he can see into the windows of all of his neighbors because it’s been hot and everyone has their windows and shades open.

This movie comes across as extremely mundane, and it thrives in its mundanity. See, we spend an inordinate amount of time with L B as he gets to know each of his neighbors via his window. There’s a dancer who likes to party with the men, a couple who I think are pretty weird because they put their mattress on their balcony each night to sleep, a newly wed couple, a composer, a nosy lady, a lonely old maid, and a couple where the wife in really ill. It’s this last couple that’s important, but we’ll get to that. Now, nothing terribly exciting happens throughout most of the build up. There are some puzzling moments, and there’s some time devoted to conjecture, but again, it all comes across as pretty mundane for lack of a better word. At one point, there’s a rain storm. During this night, the husband of the ill woman leaves and returns to his apartment three times. Back and forth to the apartment three times in the middle of the night strikes L B as odd and piques his interest in the couple. He begins to tailor together a narrative wherein the husband murdered the wife and scattered her body parts around the city. The idea is enticing enough to draw in Lisa, L B’s girlfriend, and Stella, L B’s home nurse. Watching the husband becomes a full time affair when L B realizes that he hasn’t seen the wife since the night of the storm.

L B calls his detective friend in to consult, but the detective friend brushes the whole thing off, and rationalizes all of the theories away in a pretty rational fashion, but L B remains undeterred. Finally, as L B believes that the husband is about to make a run for it, Lisa and Stella sneak out to see what that husband buried in his flower garden. Lisa takes things one step further and breaks into the apartment where the couple live. She’s caught by the husband, who starts to assault her so L B has to call the police. In all of the commotion, the husband catches L B spying. Lisa gets taken to the police station to booked for burglary. L B sends Stella to bail her out, and calls his friend the detective to report what had been found. Remember when I said it was a mundane film? It’s an interesting effect that this has on the film as you feel the point when the tone changes literally in your bones. There’s so little build up that once the suspenseful stuff actually starts, you’re caught a little off guard, and it has a hefty effect on the mood. The husband breaks into L B’s apartment and attempts to dump him out of his window, but just in the nick of time, everyone shows up to save the day. L B breaks his other leg during the struggle, but is fine otherwise. I suppose he probably learned his lesson about spying on his neighbors. The detective friend tells Stella during the resolve of the climax that the husband had buried a hat box in the garden, and asks if she wanted to know what was in there. She says that she’d rather not get caught up in it, but dang it, I want to know what’s in the box! But everything resolves in a nice tidy way, and everyone who is supposed to be left happy is happy.

Hitchcock does his usual commendable job with this one. It is a slow burn so if you can’t handle films that take their time in the pacing department, this one might not be for you. But I found a new appreciation for how Hitchcock will linger on things to let the weight of the thing set in with the viewer. Be it a look, or a minute gesture, he allows those things to carry the weight of his visual narrative in a very effective way. Due to the nature of L B’s injury, there’s very little variety in set location. We basically get up close and personal with his apartment. As with any Hitchcock film, the devil is in the details with this one. He goes out of his way to show you nothing really pertinent, or absolute in terms of who did what, but it does try to keep you off balance with the old “everything you know is wrong” approach to L B’s theories. I’m not sure what old Al was going through at this particular point in his life, but there’s some disparaging commentary on marriage. This stems from the fact that Lisa is a well to do socialite, and he feels extremely inadequate in his relationship. I get that, but L B can be kind of a jerk about it at times. Also, there’s some chillingly forward looking commentary about constant and clandestine surveillance. I’m sure it was just starting to become a concern in 1954, but in today’s world, it’s definitely a huge thing. All in all, a really solid film, and I’d recommend it to anyone who loves those classics.

Disturbia (2007):

Like I said, I fully expected this movie to pale in comparison to Rear Window. It’s just become the go to expectation of movies made in the last 20 years or so,but I’m always happy to be pleasantly surprised, and I definitely was with this movie. I saw this one in theaters when it first came out, and left satisfied, but not overwhelmingly so. It’s definitely a competent movie, but it doesn’t strive to do anything innovative. That’s okay. I can appreciate using the tried and true, especially when you’re basing your movie off of a classic Alfred Hitchcock film.

If you’re even vaguely familiar with this movie, then you know that it stars Shia LaBeouf, but before he transformed into a walking meme, but after he committed to the Transformers franchise. There’s got to be a joke in there somewhere, but I just can’t quite get there.

There it is...

Anyway, he plays Kale, your typical middle class teenage boy. We open on him and his dad fishing. It’s actually quite touching in a nauseatingly idyllic kind of way. They share their moment and then head home, but then there’s a car accident! Now, I’m totally fine with movies using car wrecks as plot devices. I just wish that the makers of movies would put more time into researching how car wrecks actually work. This 30 to 35 MPH rear quarter panel clip results in an early 2000s Volvo station wagon getting airborne and flipping several times leaving dad in a painful, and contorted position. It’s nearly impossible to hydroplane in car going less than 35 MPH, assuming your tires are in decent shape, to say anything about catching air, but whatever. Anyway, as if that wasn’t enough, a truck hits the car and we’re made to assume that this was the death blow for daddy. Impossible, perhaps not, but it might be stretching things just a wee bit. Fortunately, the setup is really the only area where I had any issues with this movie. Once the crash is over, it’s one year later, and Kale is in Spanish class on the last day of school. I will say that for exposition, this is actually handled pretty well. Yes it’s exposition, but it’s very indirect so it doesn’t feel like exposition. Kale has trouble telling the teacher what he plans to do for the summer en Espanol, and starts getting all in his face. At some point, teach brings up pops, and Kale slugs him in the eye. It’s a good strong punch too. But Kale gets three months house arrest for the incident. I think he should have gotten a medal personally because that teacher was being a major a-hole, but I have a bit of an authority problem.

At this point, Disturbia starts to resemble Rear Window a lot. Kale has to figure out how to keep himself entertained while on house arrest for three months. At first, it’s what you’d expect a middle class teenage boy to do. He plays games on XBox Live, he buys music off of iTunes. Oh yeah, there’s a lot of product placement in this movie. But his mom systematically cuts off his lifelines to the outside world stopping just short of cancelling the cable service. This leads to Kale spying on his neighbors from the windows of his house. It’s pretty standard suburban fare. There’s the couple where the husband is having an affair with the maid. There’s the boring guy obsessed with his landscaping, and then a girl moves in next door so there’s the girl swimming, and there’s the girl doing yoga. Kale actually takes the time to get down the schedule of events. It is kind of creepy. Kale catches wind through the news that a young woman has been abducted in a 60s Mustang, and then he sees that his boring landscaping obsessed neighbor drives a 60s Mustang that matches the description of the vehicle. This gets Kale spying on the neighbor, names Robert, almost obsessively. Along the way, Kale befriends the new girl next door, and gets his friend Ronnie in on the surveillance. They make it kind of a game.

Eventually, these teenagers get pretty high tech in their methods. Kale has something like four cameras watching Robert’s house. There’s that tense meeting between the protagonist and the antagonist where each sizes up the other usually while the latter invades the bubble of the former. There’s also the obligatory romantic subplot that involves the main protagonist and the lead love interest. There’s a good bit of humor in this film to offset the tension a little. The tension is handled really well in this movie too. It builds gradually, and when it finally climaxes, it’s pretty exciting. I read from several sources that the climax was cliche and tired, but as I watched, I didn’t get that impression at all. I actually saw it as a decent homage to 90s teen slasher flicks, which made sense to me since that’s the genre that it was trying to fit into. Anyway, obviously Robert was a psycho killer. There’s a tense grapple at the end. You get into Robert’s life via an up close and personal tour of all the places in his house that he never intended anyone to see. But he gets stabbed through the chest with some hedge clippers, and Kale saves his mom, and everyone lives happily ever after. Kale even gets his house arrest shortened.

I’d really have to call this a sleeper hit for its day. It opened about a month before Spider-Man 3, which say what you will, but that movie made all the money. Still, Disturbia managed to make about six times what it cost to make and that’s nothing to scoff at. As I said, it doesn’t really try to innovate, but it does try to do what it’s doing competently. That may not get a movie a prestigious spot with most people in the annals of film history, but I can appreciate doing something well. There are a few fake out moments to keep you off balance as the story unfolds. They may just serve to tip most people off, but if you play along, they’re fun. David Morse plays Robert, and he plays a fantastic creepy serial killer. He just owns every scene that he’s in. For his part, Shia LaBeouf puts in a good performance as well. He’s witty and funny, but when he needs to be anything else, he pulls it off well. But by far the thing that I have to praise this movie on is the fact that Carrie-Anne Moss plays Kale’s mom, and I didn’t recognize her for her more memorable role until I was researching this article.

This one.

I had a lot of fun with these two films, if anything, just for the gap of time between their releases. Rear Window was 1954, and Disturbia was 2007. That’s 53 years between debuts. This leaves them as sort of time capsules in film history. You can really get a solid sense of who was watching movies at the time of each movie’s release. Rear Window is so cerebral that I don’t think younger audiences are really going to get it. Sure they’ll probably get the jist by the end, but the movie isn’t terribly explicit in the way that it presents itself. Everything is implied. This is most likely because there was a pretty large divide in the market between films for adults and films for children back in the day, and this movie is most definitely for adults. On the other hand, Disturbia is more straightforward in the way that it tells a similar story. The characters and the setting are geared towards an adolescent audience, and I think this is because more and more movies are being watched by teens in the US than most other demographics. Hence, the presentation is less subtle, and ironically, more explicit in the area of gore because we’ve come to expect that from teen slashers these days. All in all, there’s an interesting contrast in the way that these two similar stories are told. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, but each tells their story in their way very well. I’d recommend either of these movies simply for the differences in the presentation, and the eye opening experience of viewing each. Give them a watch for sure! Here’s the old and new this new year! Now stay tuned as we continue examining the media that drives the world!