There’s this great Otto Preminger movie from the 1960’s called “Bunny Lake is Missing.” It’s about a woman, Ann Lake (Carol Lynley), whose daughter, Bunny, has vanished into thin air. Then everyone around Ann tells her that Bunny never existed, sending her into a bizarre insanity spiral. It’s an unsettling thriller — both morbidly funny and just creepy enough to make you question your faith in humanity — and it’s a shame that more mainstream movies don’t have time for those sorts of audience-daring shenanigans anymore.
Jodie Foster’s latest, “Flightplan,” a loose remake of “Bunny Lake Is Missing” that also lifts plot elements from Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes,” would appear to have no time to send audiences into serious doubt about its protagonist’s psychological stability either. That would distract from mother lion Jodie’s mission of doom against whoever’s trying to mess with her mind.
“Flightplan” is the second of an unintentional trilogy of post-9/11 fear-sploitation movies about why you should, in fact, be absolutely freaked out to be on any commercial jet anywhere — the first was the schlocky and ludicrous but immensely fun stab-the-horrible-person-you’re-stuck-next-to-in-coach revenge movie, “Red Eye,” and the third will be next year’s Samuel Jackson-starring “Snakes On A Plane,” about terrorists who unleash deadly snakes on a flight and which, if it’s any sort of self-respecting snakes-on-plane film, will allow Sam J. the creative license and branding opportunity to shout people down with, “There’s motherf--kin’ snakes on this plane!”
“Flightplan’s” plot concerns a mother (Foster) traveling from Berlin to the United States with her young daughter. When mom wakes up from her in-flight nap not only is her child missing, no one will admit to ever seeing the kid in the first place. This turn of events leads not to a Carol Lynley-esque fall to pieces, but to a Lara Croft frenzy of determined yelling, running, fireballs and just-feminine-enough “Mission Impossible” black T-shirt and stretch-fabric pants that give when the ass-kickery needs to get really nice. All you really need to do is check the close-up of Foster on the poster. Those are the gritted teeth of a can-do gal about to go full-tilt vigilante.
Need a tough guy? Hire FosterWhen I first moved to Los Angeles and decided to write full time instead of just self-publishing the dumb little punk rock zine I had going, I supported myself by teaching English as a Second Language to adults. One of my students was a young French woman named Charlotte. Charlotte knew my after-school job was to run around to movie press junkets and ask celebrities softball questions in exchange for a nice buffet. She liked to mock that work. “American moveeez,” she’d hiss. “All zee time bang bang bang.” Charlotte really loved Jodie Foster. That is, she loved the Oscar-winning, brainiac, Francophile Jodie who once starred in a Claude Chabrol film and who directed the gentle “Little Man Tate” She even loved the Jodie of crud like “Nell,” “Contact” and “Anna and The King.” That’s a fan.
But Charlotte didn’t care for “Panic Room,” the one where Jodie and her tomboy Baby Jodie get stuck in their fancy state-of-the-art panic room while bad men ransack their home and try to kill them both. It was beneath Charlotte’s idealized Jodie. And in some ways she was right. The complex characterizations that elevated “Silence of the Lambs” from serial killer B-movie to art were out the window. Like “Bunny Lake is Missing,” “Lambs” demanded the audience admit that there was more happening onscreen than just another psychological horror show.
“Panic Room,” though, was mostly a fear-mongering ad aimed at rich people, who saw it and decided in that Veruca Salt way that they all needed panic rooms, too. The feminist hero who, though terrified of Buffalo Bill, still had the nerve not to call back-up while stumbling around his torture-home in the pitch black, the one that made Charlotte’s heart beat faster, was suddenly on vacation in Hollywood, rolling around naked in money, drinking Red Bull and going bang bang bang.
And really, so what if she stays there? Foster seems to be, for now anyway, unconcerned about making prestige pictures that’ll rake in nominations for awards she won’t win anyway. She’s got two Oscars already; she has to wait for her “On Golden Pond” to get another. So in the meantime the woman has, I believe, a different agenda than one that forces her to slap on makeup and trot down award-show red carpets with yet another person with whom she’s not romantically involved, one she was typecast to inhabit at a very young age when she starred in the TV movie “My Sister Hank” but has now refined to the point of transcending it. She wants to be a dude. Also a chick. At the same time. And she’s succeeding.
Her film history points to this. As a child actor her characters were mostly tomboys in Toughskins who could beat you up. Even when they were preternaturally sexualized, like in “Taxi Driver” or “Bugsy Malone,” these were rough girls. As an adult, Foster has taken on more than her share of roles that could have been, and in some cases were originally, written for men. Make that men who were never victims. After Hinckley, there would be no more damsels in distress on her plate. With the possible exception of her laughably unconvincing turn as someone hot for Richard Gere in “Sommersby” — go back and watch that one; she looks happiest when she’s shaving his face with a straight razor, this close to getting all “Color Purple” on his lying ass — her roles are now motherly but also steely and gender nonspecific in a way that’s really very progressive — if not human — even when the movie is crap.
With “Panic Room” and “Flightplan,” her desire to be not simply strong but something akin to The Rock in “Walking Tall” is becoming more visible. It’s not enough that comic-book heroines can kick ass. Really smart moms who’ve just boarded a plane in the smart person capital of Berlin must be allowed to kick asses too. That’s Foster’s latest dare to her audience: see her as glasses-wearing, day-saving Mommy and Daddy.
So here she is now, entertaining you on her own odd terms, a power player in Hollywood who makes popcorn thrillers with a brainy faux-finish that’ll allow her to stay home with her kids on Oscar night, rake in a yacht-sized haul of cash while she’s at it and piss off genteel fans who can’t believe she’s turning into her creepy pal Mel Gibson at his macho “Lethal Weapon”-ish worst. It’s an accomplishment, one Charlotte should be kind of proud of, even if her preferred version of Jodie is missing. But she probably won’t be. Oh well, her loss.
Dave White is this guy with a blog called Dave White Knows. Read it at .