*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C
starring Leelee Sobieski, Stellan Skarsgård, Diane Lane, Bruce Dern
screenplay by Wesley Strick
directed by Daniel Sackheim
BUY @ AMAZON
by Bill Chambers In The Glass House, the picture-perfect legal guardians of an orphaned teenage girl and her little brother turn out to be Gomez and Morticia. (Actually, that's overstating their appeal.) The trouble with this set-up is that it has the pretense of a moral but revolves around a character in Leelee Sobieski's Ruby who hasn't done anything to place herself in her precarious situation except obey the law and her elders. By the time she gains agency and the film puts her in the driver's seat (quite literally, as it happens), The Glass House seems to be apologizing to young adults on screen and off for suggesting they're not always in control. It could be said to, like Home Alone or The Rugrats Movie, spread a false sense of security to its target demographic.
Ruby is a fairly status quo American teen–cute, poised, with a bit of a chip on her shoulder–whose parents' fatal car accident leaves her and her kid bro Rhett (Trevor Morgan) in the care and custody of former neighbours the Glasses, Erin (Diane Lane) and Terry (Stellan Skarsgård), a childless (and incongruous) couple with a fragile, transparent house in Malibu to match both their name and the state of their marriage. While we're on the subject, one of the film's biggest letdowns is that this bewitching set effectively goes to waste: A veritable hothouse symbolic of voyeurism and fragility that becomes a hall of mirrors in the dark, it washes out as such a D.O.A. metaphor that the big showdown takes place far afield of the titular manse, on a mountainous stretch of highway. Nothing shatters except our expectations.
Almost immediately, Ruby senses there's something hinky-dinky about the Glasses, who insist she share a bedroom with Rhett despite the palatial interior of their new digs. She's worried he'll peek as she undresses; one wonders, if she considers this a potential enough problem to say it out loud, whether maybe Erin and Terry's idiosyncrasies are the least of her concerns. Things get worse: Terry is on the phone more than, well, a teenage girl, while Erin, an anaesthesiologist, knows where Ruby can get some killer menstrual-cramp medication. Oh, and the Glasses buy off Rhett's affections with a PlayStation, which is how you know this is a Sony production.
It comes to light that the Glasses are after Ruby's trust (fund, that is), but the couple couldn't be less conspicuous about it, and Ruby's suspicions continue to mount. Terry's decision to play cat-and-mouse with her is one of the great mysteries (I am reminded of the post-trial O.J. Simpson champing at the bit to confess), and the way he gazes at a bikini-clad Ruby like her dirty uncle feels like the movie trying to defer its own prurient impulses onto the character. If the filmmakers had used Terry's brazen stupidity and weird kinks to say something about the male ego, Hitchcock-style (there is a neo-Shadow of a Doubt in here somewhere), not merely to heroize Ruby and give her a boogeyman to defeat, they might have wound up with a more original, less offensive final product. In its current state, although Ruby and Rhett must face the death–and possible murder–of their parents, it's only going to make them stronger. The adult world frankly needs another adolescent empowerment fable like it needs air pollution.
THE DVD
Columbia TriStar's DVD version of The Glass House features typically sterling 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen and fullscreen (1.33:1) transfers on opposite sides of the single-layered disc. The latter is a combination of cropped and unmatted, as the film was shot in Super35; it's tastefully composed if marginally less cinematic. The 5.1 Dolby Digital soundmix cranks up the bass and makes optimum use of the rear channels during a thunderstorm and the climax, though dialogue can be too whispery: two eavesdropped conversations necessitated flicking on the subtitles for me.
Director Daniel Sackheim and hack screenwriter Wesley Strick chime in with a feature-length commentary that had me tearing my hair out within five minutes. For starters, Strick refers to Rosemary's Baby as a widescreen picture whose cinematography inspired Sackheim to shoot The Glass House in 2.35:1. (Rosemary's Baby was shot with spherical lenses and framed for 1.85:1 projection.) Strick, who wrote the Cape Fear remake for Martin Scorsese, obviously didn't learn a damn thing from him. Meanwhile, Sackheim praises 2.35:1 by saying, during a boring medium close-up of Chris Noth and nothing else, "You can fit more into the frame!" Other bonuses include a deleted funeral scene (with Strick/Sackheim commentary) executed with more passion than anything in the final cut, plus trailers for The Glass House and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and a batch of filmographies for the key players.
107 minutes; PG-13; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround, French DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French subtitles; DVD-10; Region One; Columbia TriStar
