Is that really Three’s Company’s flip, nimble John Ritter behind dark-rimmed glasses and sunk deep into a shrink’s beard? Behaving so seriously, and convincingly, as a therapist in dire trouble? And is that the hilariously protean show-biz phenom Tracey Ullman as a downtrodden middle-aged, middle-class wife angrily grieving over her husband’s sudden infidelity? Even William H. Macy, as that transgressing spouse, has surrendered his monkey-mouthed grin from Fargo and State and Main to shiver in melancholia as the sad-eyed, middle-aged protagonist-in-crisis of Panic, an affecting and truly unusual neo-noir that’s opening this Friday at the Kendall Square.

Macy’s post-40 Alex is a much repressed and now depressed Californian who’s seeking psychiatric help for the first occasion in his life. Slowly, over several visits, his story comes into focus. His marriage to Martha (Ullman) isn’t making him happy any more, even though he adores his six-year-old son, Sammy (David Dorfman). He’s developed a crush on the brash, bisexual, neurotic young hairdresser Sarah (Neve Campbell), whom he met in the lobby outside his therapist’s office: she’s seeing another shrink. Most important, he’s become alienated from lifetime employment in the family business, which is run by his dominating, villainous father (Donald Sutherland, swaggering and imperious) with the input of his comely bourgeois mother (Barbara Bain).

“What do you do?” John Ritter’s therapist inquires.

“I kill people,” Alex answers.

He’s an assassin with a gun and a silencer who obediently carries out the biddings of his pop. How did such a career begin? In a creepy flashback, we see grammar-school Alex, tiny and squeamish, being taught by dad to use a revolver and shoot a poor little squirrel. In an even creepier flashback, Alex is a short teenage boy whose large father is taking him to the beach for his first murder. He shoots a man in a car through a closed window while dad in the background cheers him on, congratulating Alex as if he had just passed his driving test. It’s all very Pavlovian, this robotic, brainwashed lad.

Back to the present. Alex is given a new assignment, but he balks, since it’s someone he knows: his psychiatrist! Should he kill the shrink or just say no to his still-overpowering father? Should he leave his wife and child for a precarious relationship with Sarah? Panic gets its class from Jeffrey Jur’s superb color cinematography, and from the uniform effectiveness of the acting ensemble. The casting against the grain of Ritter, Ullman, and Macy isn’t a parlor trick: they all extend their acting range from sweet to dour. And Campbell is a fine surprise also, graduating from a bevy of teen leads into this complex portrait of a 23-year-old swimming in ambivalences and confusions. Panic’s third great asset: first-time filmmaker Henry Bromell’s smart, unerring dialogue. The man can write, and Panic shows off the best indie script in months, since Chuck and Buck and You Can Count on Me. Only at the end does the film falter, with a too-predictable shooting and an endless coda. Better have finished a bit earlier, with someone leaving the world with a bullet in the belly but also with a suddenly cleared conscience — a delicious homage, I suspect, to what concludes the best noir of them all, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity.

Panic is such an interesting, well-made film that it’s hard to understand why so many months went by before it located a distributor, San Francisco’s enterprising Roxy Pictures. On the other hand, I’m perplexed as why Shooting Gallery has bothered to pick up and release such a marginal work as writer/director David Maquiling’s Too Much Sleep (which is opening at the Copley Place). It’s just so unremarkable, one among hundreds of sincere but artistically limited American indies. What if I say that my favorite moments watching and listening to Too Much Sleep were appreciating Mitchell Toomey’s melodic, minimalist rock tunes over the final credits? And what happens? Jack Crawford (Marc Palmieri), a slacker security guard, takes a bus to work one day, checks out pretty Kate (Nicol Zanzarella), and gives up his seat to a middle-aged woman. After both women have exited the bus, Jack finds that a paper bag holding his gun is missing. One of them must have stolen it, so Jack goes on the hunt.

For the rest of this shaggy-dog saga, Jack scours suburban Jersey for his weapon, from a male strip joint to (off screen) a gynecology office. Along the way, he meets characters, too many of them, who talk at him in monologues. Self-conscious laborious ones. For much of the looking, Jack is accompanied by a 50ish Italian-American guy named Eddie (Pasquale Gaeta) with political connections, and this Eddie is given lots of space for his Joe Pesci–like riffs. He wears out his welcome in act one, as nothing he says is really funny or engaging. Still, filmmaker Maquiling acts as if he’d stumbled onto his Falstaff. Eddie keeps talking away, through acts two and three, and there’s only one audience thought: Too Much Sleep, please, please, end.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com.

Issue Date: March 22-29, 2001