Movie Review: The Glass House (2001)

A suspense drama with gaslighting elements, The Glass House repeatedly threatens to become quite good without ever delivering.

In Los Angeles, 16 year old Ruby Baker (Leelee Sobieski) and her younger brother Rhett are orphaned when a car crash claims their parents. Family lawyer Alvin Begleiter (Bruce Dern) advises Ruby she stands to inherit a large estate once she achieves adulthood. In the meantime he arranges for the children to live with Terry and Erin Glass (Stellan Skarsgård and Diane Lane), former neighbours of the Bakers who have now moved into a swish Malibu villa.

The Bakers act friendly and appear wealthy, but Ruby soon notices creepy behaviour. She and Rhett are assigned a single bedroom, Terry's behaviour towards Ruby borders on lustful, and Erin may be a drug addict. Terry's car leasing business is in financial trouble, and Ruby starts to suspect Terry is more interested in her inheritance than her well-being. She turns to Begleiter and social worker Nancy Ryan (Kathy Baker) for help, but untangling Terry's intentions will be risky.

While woman-in-distress dramas are common, The Glass House adds a twist by applying the threat to a newly-orphaned 16 year old. Not quite an adult but already quite astute, Ruby is still learning to trust her instincts, and in the hands of a doleful Leelee Sobieski she is a complex protagonist defying both victim and hero stereotypes, and the best thing about the film.

Director Daniel Sackheim is more at home in television, and here never quite settles on a tone for Wesley Strick's script. The mood erratically oscillates between routine family adaptation travails, something-is-not-quite-right suspicion, and outright suspense before jumping to violence and carnage in the final act. All the shadings are handled with decent proficiency but the whole rarely gels into an effective package.

Sackheim does deliver some polished visuals. The Glass villa is a modern artwork of - what else - glass, and the scarcity of opaque walls compromises essential hiding places. The coastal highways around Malibu provide the snaky asphalt for plenty of sleek driving misadventures. 

Apart from Ruby, the other characters are routine. Stellan Skarsgård is an effective wolf, but loses his sheep's clothing early. Diane Lane is confined to one of her much less interesting roles as Erin, while Bruce Dern is underused. Rita Wilson, Michael O'Keefe and Chris Noth have small roles. 

The Glass House is never polished enough to fully shine, but it does occasionally glisten.



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Movie Review: Our Kind Of Traitor (2016)

A low-key spy thriller, Our Kind Of Traitor features a mildly interesting story but never fully engages.

Englishman and teacher of poetry Perry MacKendrick (Ewan McGregor) and his wife Gail (Naomie Harris) are in Morocco on vacation, trying to patch up their marriage. A burly Russian calling himself Dima (Stellan Skarsgård) insists on buying Perry drinks, invites him to a party, and arranges a friendly tennis game the next morning. Dima introduces Perry and Gail to his extended family and invites them to another party, where he reveals himself to Perry as the chief money launderer for the Russian mafia, and a changing of the guard means that Dima and his family are in grave danger.

Dima wants Perry to connect him to British Intelligence services, offering information about corrupt high-level British government officials in exchange for asylum for his family. Back in London Perry does connect with Hector (Damian Lewis) of the MI6. Under-resourced and lacking support from his superiors, Hector recruits Perry and Gail for a follow-up meeting with Dima in Paris, where Dima's enemies start to get suspicious about the tweedy Englishman hovering around their target.

The John le Carré book worked on the page, but this adaptation, directed by Susanna White and written by Hossein Amini, struggles to tease out cinematic anchors. The story features no central protagonist or theme other than the dense fog of corruption and careerism subsuming anything resembling morality. Despite good production values, dedicated performances, and a faithful tone, the film operates in a void that discourages caring.

Perry and Gail are barely sketched-in, their marital troubles only hinted at. Hector and his crew are all business. Dima's family are background characters with almost no lines of dialogue. The bad guys in the form of Prince (the head of the mafia) and all his goons are one-dimensional evil monsters in three-piece suits.

With Stellan Skarsgård in full-on effusive mode, only Dima comes across as a halfway interesting character, and the curious bond he forges with Perry is the closest White gets to creating a heart for the film. But even here there is trouble: it is difficult to imagine a man with Dima's resources, wealth and connections having to rely on a random encounter with an Englishman to forge his family's escape plan. And Perry's justifications for allowing himself to get sucked into the orbit of an admitted master criminal and killer are only half-convincing.

At least Our Kind Of Traitor attempts to be cerebral, with dialogue, plotting and low-levels of unease and tension displacing mindless action. But the message of pessimistic doom loses its bite in the absence of hopeful souls willing to endure the suffering.

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