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Civic Duty is a twist on Rear Window that fairly shouts its post-9/11 theme to the skies -- in an atmosphere of fear, any perfectly normal person can become a crazed conspiracy nut. Thank you very much, mass media.
In order to make this work, you have to take a perfectly normal character and make him crazy in believable increments -- otherwise you end up with Invasion Of the Body Snatchers or one of those '50s Cold War moral hygiene films where people become Marxists overnight by drinking flouridated water.
With Civic Duty, Canadian director Jeff Renfroe has made a lurid, tense film about an incident-in-the-making that fairly crackles with the inevitability of its events. But, subtle it's not. And what he hasn't done is made me believe it could happen to me (you, I'm not so sure about).
Call it a joint failure-to-convince between Renfroe and Peter Krause (Six Feet Under), the star of the film, whose job it should be to convey decency curdling. Instead, when we meet his character Terry Allen, he's just been laid off from his office job, he's losing out on a mortgage he applied for, he's abusive towards service staff, he's being a jerk to his wife (the ubiquitous Kari Matchett) about an ex-boyfriend, and if he hasn't quite hit "disgruntled" yet, there is steam coming out of his ears. And everywhere he turns, a CNN-like news report is giving him the latest colour alert status and reporting on thwarted terror plots.
Even before the script gets around to telling us Terry has a history of anger issues, we kind of get it. So when a young "Middle-Eastern-looking guy" named Gabe (Khaled Abol Naga) moves in next door, he makes a handy lightning rod for Terry's disgruntlement. Of course, so would just about anybody. Nonetheless, with time on his hands, Terry soon alarms his wife by conducting FBI's Most Wanted searches on their computer instead of looking for work, becoming sweaty and crazed as his obsession deepens.
Soon he's downloaded his paranoia onto an unimpressed FBI agent (Richard Schiff), and becomes doubly enraged by what he sees as the Bureau's lethargy. There's a megalomania that comes into play, recognizable to anybody whose job is public enough to attract "that kind" of letter-writer or e-mailer.
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Of course, there's another consideration Civic Duty must address -- and that's the relevance of Terry's mania (you know what they say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you). In the violent, climactic scenes, Naga infuses Gabe with a decency and ease that says "he's a regular guy, one of us."
And yet Renfroe tends to steer the movie away from answering its ultimate question -- are we unnecessarily fearful, or do we have a right to be? It's an even-handedness that leaves the viewer unsatisfied and ultimately renders the movie wishy-washy.
After all, Roosevelt didn't say "All we have to fear is fear itself... well, fear itself and the Nazis, and the Japanese, and this atomic superweapon the Germans might beat us to, and... y'know what? If you need me, I'll be under the bed."
(This film is rated 14-A)