'Breakdown' dips into class warfare

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): "It could happen to you" may be the oldest and most cliched tagline in cinema. As the recent crop of rousing, knock-your-socks-off blockbusters attests, current script-writers seem to think that what moviegoers want to see these days are larger-than-life catastrophes, things that just don't really happen. Sure, down-to-earth dramas and thrillers are fine. From time to time, coherent plots and full-bodied characters are even nicer. Yet coherence -- as realism -- belongs only to real life: at home, at school, in our tepid and boring world.

Good plots have increasingly become the domain of cable TV.

Even the trailer of Breakdown -- newcomer Jonathan Mostow's gripping suspense debut -- betrays this current prejudice. Glimpses of a distraught Kurt Russell standing by a red Cherokee jeep in the middle of nowhere seem like ancient cinema, unimaginative and anemic, or worse, a B-movie. Its long, lateral pan through the southwest's wasteland, with its bright but dusty veneer and perpetual hint of impending storms, represents another bad cinematic omen. Indeed, why watch another average Joe looking for his missing wife if billionaire Mel Gibson (in Ransom) has combed the glitzier canvas of New York in a similar pursuit?

Right?

Wrong. Breakdown is actually a good film, although some of its social implications leave a lot to be desired. As always, critics have been quick to accuse it of culling heavily from The Vanishing and Duel (the film that first drew attention to Steven Spielberg). But this crime is hardly original in an industry not lauded for its authentic ideas. The very simplicity of its plot -- and of its execution -- plays neatly to our baser instincts, much like those 1970s explorations of human foibles in which a glance or a wink could mean a thousand things, and camera technique hadn't taken a backseat to computer-generated wizardry.

Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan play Jeff and Amy Taylor, a yuppie couple from Boston who are driving cross-country in their brand new red jeep en route to new jobs in San Diego. They nearly collide with a local van and decide to take a break. At a gas station, the van driver (M.C. Gainey) makes sarcastic comments about the jeep's shiny attributes and later accuses Jeff of nearly killing him. The Taylors take no notice and resume their journey.

Somewhere in the desert, their car breaks down. A seemingly well-meaning driver of an 18-wheeler truck (J.T. Walsh) pulls over and offers Amy a ride to the nearest diner where she can phone for a tow truck. She never returns. Everybody claims ignorance. A sinister conspiracy seems to be at play.

The movie's thirty minute revelation is a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, whose idea of the Ordinary Guy in Extraordinary Circumstances has long become the worn-out but surefire staple of the suspense genre. Here Mostow shows a minimalist restraint that is neither vapid nor particularly inspired, with only a smidgen of musical interference that recalls the heyday of French cinema. Nothing like the grit nor the visual eloquence of Quentin Tarantino at his sanest (remember Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction), mind you, but still a welcome respite from today's hyper-stylization.

Russell is a much better Everyman than he is an Action Hero wannabee (forget Escape from L.A.), and by the time trouble hits, we are already rooting for him. His dialog with Quinlan, while no exercise in studied repartee, sets a realistic tone.

The flat cinematography of the southwest is a nod to 1978 when Superman first blazed onto the collective consciousness with its murky zoom-ins of isolated gas stations and Lois Lane's drive to doom in the middle of canyon country. Lackluster by today's standards, maybe, but a great deal more suggestive of ominous things to come than an armada of invading aliens. In fact, it is a celebration of primal, unmanufactured terror: the sight of a battered van slowly turning around on the faraway horizon, splinters of paranoia settling in as the sky seems to close in on Jeff. Evil in broad daylight. An epic setting for an intensely personal drama. The irony is palpable.

The movie gains pace when Jeff decides to take on the bad guys -- a rural take on a recent abduction film, Nick of Time, starring Johnny Depp. It keeps gaining pace, in fact, until it culminates in a slam-bang maze of car stunts and visceral bravado that plonks Breakdown right on the same level of box-office gratuity it initially professes to avoid. A sign maybe that Jonathan Mostow wants to keep making films?

Beyond the movie's mainstream finale, Mostow manages to milk another fine performance from the ever-reliable J.T. Walsh (Executive Decision), who endorses the common belief that evil comes in unintimidating packages. Yet, when Mostow and co- screenwriter Sam Montgomery try to stretch the counterpoint further by portraying him as a loving father, the message starts to get lost on audiences.

And here's the problem. It is clear that the movie's underlying theme is humanity's oldest adversary: class warfare. Jeff's few encounters with the locals couldn't expose them better: references to Amy's Benetton t-shirt ("Buttondown?", interprets the diner's owner, a hint at a gaping social gap), eerie silences at Belle's diner, some misplaced advice, totally different sensibilities ("Maybe she got away from you, cowboy", "Don't open your hood when you go into the store"). Yet, as soon as motives are revealed, the movie quickly dips into stock Hollywood formula (i.e. all the bad guys die), and any talk of "us versus them" goes right down the drain.

What unfolds is no different than the gypsy analogy in Stephen King's latest offering, Thinner. Massachussets is home to clean- cut, virtuous, well-educated, hard-working people. The southwest is a living hell populated with scowling rednecks who are itching to dole out vernacular justice. This is worse than racism. And all the more so because Hollywood rarely ever gives the issue the treatment it deserves.