BlinkDash

It tells you something--it may even tell you enough--that the man, named Alex, is played by William H. Macy. This wonderful actor has a gift for edgy unhappiness, repressed resentment, and in "Panic," his character speaks too calmly and moves too smoothly, as if afraid of trip wires and booby traps. He spent his childhood afraid to stand up to his father, and in a sense his childhood has never ended.

Henry Bromell's "Panic" seeps with melancholy, old wounds, repressed anger, lust. That it is also caustically funny and heartwarming is miraculous: How does it hit so many different notes and never strain? It has a relationship between Alex and his son Sammy that reminds us of "The Sixth Sense," and one between Alex and the sexy young Sarah (Neve Campbell) that evokes "American Beauty." And Alex himself, trying to keep everyone happy, trying to keep secrets, trying to separate the compartments of his life, has the desperation of the character Macy played in "Fargo." But this is not a movie assembled from spare parts. Bromell began as a writer ("Northern Exposure," "Chicago Hope"), and this is a first film made with joy and with a writer's gift for character and dialogue. It involves a situation rich with irony and comic possibilities but isn't cynical about it; it's the kind of story that is funny when you hear it about someone else, but not funny if it happens to you.

Alex was reared by his father, Michael (Donald Sutherland), to be a hit man. They started with squirrels and worked up from there. Alex didn't like killing squirrels, and in all of his killings since, it has been his father's finger pulling the trigger of Alex's tortured psyche. Alex is good at his job. But it makes him sick.

In the waiting room of his psychiatrist (John Ritter) he meets the patient of another doctor. This is Sarah, played by Neve Campbell as bright, cheeky and with a gift for sharp observation. She has a complicated love life, is aware of her appeal and asks Alex if he's a guy in mid-life crisis who thinks a sexy young girl might be just the ticket. In "American Beauty," Kevin Spacey did indeed think that about the pompon girl, but Alex is looking not for sex but for approval, forgiveness, redemption; sex with Sarah would be less lust than rehab.

There are other important women in the picture. Tracey Ullman is Martha, Alex's wife, and Barbara Bain is Deidre, his mother. Martha has no idea how Alex really earns his living. Deidre knows all about everything, and when Alex confides that he wants out, she delivers a merciless lecture about how his father spent his whole life building up the family business, and Alex is an ungrateful child to destroy that dream. Yes, this is ironic, discussing murder in business terms, but it is so easy to separate success from morality. This could be any business in which the father insists that the son surrender his own dreams for the old man's.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46pmKehk2J%2FcXyQ