`Glass House’ is sadly hilarious

It may seem insensitive to gripe about how bad a movie is given the events of the past two weeks, but I look to movies, especially formula movies, as sources of solace in times of grief. Modern studio movies are rarely great art, but familiar material can have a strange comforting effect. There’s nothing wrong with using movies for escape.

But the comfort I found in The Glass House, a supposed thriller starring the stone-faced Leelee Sobieski, wasn’t what I expected. For the first time in months, I howled at a movie. And the audience joined in with me; The Glass House is by far the funniest inept movie to come along in years, and if people catch on before it bombs at the box office, it could become the next Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The movie begins as an idiotic variation on George Cukor’s Gaslight, in which a woman is systematically driven towards insanity. The Glass House then turns into an idiotic variation of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (soon to be revived at the New York Film Festival) as two children are pursued by a psychotic guardian. Sixteen-year-old Ruby Baker (Sobieski) doesn’t like her parents’ rules. Why she should care is beyond me, as she parties every night without her parents’ notice. (”My ‘rents are just adorably clueless,” she says, employing an interesting, if unlikely, slang term.)

Ruby is shocked, though not remorseful, when her parents are killed in a car crash. Initially, things are looking up for her and her brother Rhett (Trevor Morgan) – they inherit a large sum of money from their parents, and they’re placed in the care of Terry and Erin Glass (Stellan Skarsgard and Diane Lane), old and wealthy friends of their parents.

But there’s something undeniably sinister going on at the glass house – which, just for kicks, is actually made of glass. For starters, Terry and Erin make Ruby and Rhett share a room. They make them eat calamari instead of pizza. They won’t let Ruby go swimming at three in the morning. “You’re in good hands,” Erin tells Ruby. Uh-oh.

As Terry and Erin’s web of menace tightens – like when Erin tells Ruby to be more open-minded about her new school – Ruby becomes progressively more suspicious. It gets worse, but when the movie’s secrets are finally revealed, one wonders why Terry and Erin bothered taunting Ruby in the first place.

Something is indeed amiss at the Glass house, but the way the movie tells the story, you’re given all the wrong cues. Ruby is shocked – shocked! – to find that Terry and Erin fired their maid, but when she comes home late one night to find Erin shooting up with a needle as long as a salad tong, she barely reacts. (”What you saw last night wasn’t what you think,” Terry says. “Erin suffers from diabetes.”)

The movie only has the potential to work as long as it’s told from Ruby’s perspective – that is, as long as we gradually discover what’s going on – so when we start to see things that Ruby doesn’t see, the movie loses all potential for suspense.

The screenplay is by Wesley Strick, who, having co-written The Saint, is perfectly comfortable in the Land of Incoherence. He seems to have watched so many movies that he’s forgotten how people really talk. On Ruby’s first day in her new school, her teacher actually says, “Let’s all make Ruby feel welcome!” When Ruby asks Terry how he knew she sneaked out to see friends, he replies, “How did we know? It’s our job to know.”

If one were to graph how suspense should build in the movie, the chart versus time would show a steady incline. But with the way television veteran Daniel Sackheim directs, the movie is a hopeless maze of zigzags and anticlimaxes.

Sackheim includes the obligatory stuff – a shot of Sobieski in a bra, a shot of Sobieski in a bikini, the classic “he’s not dead yet!” second climax – but in terms of pacing and suspense, the only thing he gets sort of right is the “I hope the bad guy doesn’t catch me snooping around” sequence. Sackheim actually disrupts the most suspenseful scene by crosscutting to a couple of Ruby’s friends chatting miles away.

How Skarsgard and Lane played in this trash with straight faces is beyond me, but perhaps they deserve Oscars for not cracking up. Bruce Dern has a small role in The Glass House as Ruby’s original parents’ creepy lawyer, topping the levels of camp he reached in The Haunting.

And talk about product placements: while watching The Glass House, I was overcome with the desire to buy Domino’s pizza, Pop Tarts, Minute Maid, a BMW, a Saab, an iMac, and a subscription to AOL. At least Cast Away stuck to FedEx.

Ben Kenigsberg, Columbia Daily Spectator (Columbia U.)

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