Terror paranoia

>> Low-budget thriller Civic Duty is a refreshingly reflective take on the American mentality post-9/11

by MALCOLM FRASER

Michael Moore and his rabble-rousing ilk aside, our friendly neighbours to the south have never been known for asking themselves the heavy questions on the darker side of their national character, cinematically or otherwise. So Civic Duty is an interesting oddity, a more or less mainstream American film that questions the current American mentality in its plot and themes.

Terry (Six Feet Under’s Peter Krause) is an accountant who’s just been laid off, putting into jeopardy his plans to buy a house with his wife Marla (Kari Matchett). In the midst of his attempts to get back into the alienating machine of the corporate job market, he starts to take note of the comings and goings of his new Middle Eastern neighbour Gabe (Egyptian film star Khaled Abol Naga).

Saturated with terror talk in the media, and feeling emasculated by his unemployed status, Krause becomes convinced that his neighbour is a terrorist and falls into a spiral of paranoia. When the FBI’s Agent Hillary (The West Wing’s Richard Schiff) tells him to back off, he decides to deal with the situation Charles Bronson-style.

With a Canadian director, Jeff Renfroe (who previously helmed the 2004 Fantasia prize-winner One Point O), it’s tempting to look at the film as a Canuck take on the USA, like Andrew Currie’s recent satire Fido. But screenwriter/producer Andrew Joiner is American, and the film feels less like an outsider’s critique than a much-needed soul search. The script smartly ties in media-induced terror paranoia with the USA’s downsizing-obsessed economy and sketchy mortgage market, bringing a refreshingly rare thoughtfulness to the overwhelmingly idea-deficient thriller genre.

Doing his best with a low-budget, digital aesthetic, Renfroe succeeds in creating a suspenseful atmosphere. A great deal of the dialogue-heavy film is shot in tight close-ups, which adds to the atmosphere of rising tension. But as with a lot of digital cinema, there’s a kind of sloppy hurriedness about the film that interferes with the big themes the filmmakers are tackling. It would be nice to see what Renfroe and Joiner could do with a proper budget, and even nicer if more filmmakers had the brains and cojones to take on deeper ideas in a genre context.

Civic Duty opens this Friday, May 4

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